ietf-822
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: UNICODE (was Re: NULL)

1994-10-31 18:55:22
So I'll kindly suggest that those who wish to complain about UNICODE,
(or to insult particular countries) do so elsewhere.  Such comments
can serve no useful purpose here.

These days, I have been keeping silence on UNICODE/10646 unless one
mention it not Eurocentric or have some importance here.

UNICODE was invented on behalf of American *software* vendors who want 
to build products that they can sell all over the world.  From a software
marketing point of view, this makes sense: you don't have to develop
a different product for each country, so you can sell to more markets
at lower cost.

The UNICODE people were aware of the difficulties involved, and did a 
lot of research to try to make their product as palatable as possible,
while still fitting the result in a reasonable amount of ROM space.
This involved a lot of very difficult compromises.

The important point is that UNICODE is Euro-centric and not suitable
for the international multi-lingual environment.

Despite all of this hard work,

Sanity check.

Why should we be involved in "very difficult compromises" or "all
of this hard work" when properly designed code does not have any
such problems?

I'll be happy if you can point out any "very difficult compromises"
or "hard work" necessary with ISO-2022-INT-*.

some people don't like the result.

No, of course. A lot of difficulties are pointed out and ignored
DURING the design of UNICODE. So, how can you say we should accept
the result with IMMPOSIBLE compromises?

There's also a basic rule in human nature.  People don't like having
decisions that affect them, made without their being consulted.  
Mind you, it's pretty difficult to consult everyone who might want to
use UNICODE, but that doesn't keep those who weren't consulted from 
being pissed off about it.

As I said UNICODE is for Euro-local, I don't mind Swedish use UNICODE
intranationally, though what they need is (according to private
communication with paf) merely isimultaneous support for ISO 8859/1
and ISO 8859/10. Still, I don't think support for UNICODE is any
important to affect MIME.

                                                Masataka Ohta

<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>