Excerpts from mail: 17-Nov-94 Re: SWEDISH CHARACTERS IN E.. Masataka
Ohta(_at_)necom830(_dot_)c (4923)
THIS IS A MESSAGE IN 'MIME' FORMAT. Your mail reader does not
support MIME.
Please read the first section, which is plain text, and ignore the rest.
You should have written above without "> " quotations.
Why? There's nothing in any standard that says I shouldn't write it
that way. (Actually, I didn't write that explicitly, it was added by my
mail tool. On the other hand, I wrote the mail tool, so in a sense I
did write that text -- about 3 years ago!)
Note that anyone who read my message using a MIME tool never saw that
part anyway, and so they were probably a tad confused by your arguing
with it.
No, my mail reader does not support MIME.
That's not my problem, it's yours. After years of effort, MIME is the
standard. I have no qualms about sending it out on the net.
If there were someone in a position to dictate a single
universal character set that the whole world would use, your approach
would be workable.
ISO-2022-INT-* is the one.
So your position is that someone IS in a position to dictate that
standard, and that this person is YOU? Let me know when this position
of yours is ratified by all the world's standard bodies, governments,
and email vendors, and then I'll take this claim more seriously.
Most of the Internet is uninterested in linguistic communities. One
of the reason of the failure of ISO10646/UNICODE is to hear from
them to allow arbitrary combination of combining characters. So,
let them what they want in their own way and let them alone.
This is an incredibly arrogant over-generalization. On what do you base
your claim about what interests "most of the Internet"?
I also see no evidence that ISO10646/UNICODE has failed, especially in
comparison with any other scheme (including yours).
and I think it is the only short-term feasible approach to globalized
text.
It's nott globalized at all.
Well, you can say this, since we haven't defined the term "globalized".
But I'm willing to bet you that my MIME message containing English,
Hebrew, and Japanese was readable by more people on the Internet than
any other format for representing all three languages in a single
message.
Your communication experience through English only is, virtally, NIL,
because you can do it with US-ASCII only.
I don't have a clue what you mean by this comment, but it probably
reflects more on your own mastery of English than mine. I'd like to
think that 37 years of speaking, reading, and writing English
constitutes something more than NIL experience communicating in English.
And, by the way, I don't speak ASCII when I'm communicating verbally.
Please stop telling me what I am thinking about. You are simply wrong
in that regard. I fully realize that some messages will contain
multiple languages. So what?
Yes, you fully realize that some messages will contain multiple Latin
languages. So what?
Are Hebrew and Japanese now regarded as Latin languages? My message
included text in both of these languages quite deliberately, so that you
would stop claiming that this discussion is too Eurocentric. It may be
Eurocentric in some respects, but it is certainly unfair to claim that
I've been ignoring non-Latin languages.
I'm afraid some (but not so many) of you are seeing strange glyphs
in distinct windows uurelated to the original flow of the information.
And some people are seeing all the text right in-line in their own
windows. And some are seeing the Japanese nicely integrated, and the
Hebrew in another window. And some vice versa. The real point is that
there are a whole lot of people who can see it reasonably well -- that's
a lot better result than you could get, in 1994, with any other scheme.
Your question and answer should be:
Now, would it be nicer and more elegant if this entire message
is in a single charset? Of course! And when such a universal
charset comes into widespread use, that will be great.
Until then, however,
Now is "then".
Wonderful. I am delighted to hear that you have just completed the
worldwide installation of your preferred character set. I trust that
you can now send out a message, similar to mine, that contains several
different languages and can be read even more widely than my MIME
message? I look forward to seeing it. Until you produce it, however,
your claim that "now is then" is about as meaningful as a claim that "up
is down". -- Nathaniel