At 3:58 PM 11/18/94, Dave Crocker wrote:
At 1:24 PM 11/18/94, David Goldsmith wrote:
Please stop attacking Unicode on this list. This list is about 822 and mail
David, I know you didn't cite my own note, but I got some private mail
expressing concern that my claim that we were not trying to standardize
Unicode for the Internet was, perhaps, a criticism of Unicode.
Don't worry, I certainly didn't take it that way. In the long reply I was
writing to the message (but then decided not to send because I remembered I
promised not to reply any more ^_^) I said the same thing myself: Unicode
is not now being considered as an Internet standard, and probably won't be
until and unless it starts being used widely. Even though it's not being
considered as an Internet standard now, though, some of us want to use it,
which is why I'm here. Just because something is allowed for use on the
Internet doesn't make it an Internet standard.
I personally think Unicode is good technology that could solve some
problems for the Internet, for example by being used as a transmission
technology, with messages translated by the MUA (or news or WWW agent)
to/from the user's preferred character set. However, this will just take
time. That's OK.
Just to beat this into the ground: I don't know enough to have an opinion
about Unicode. My comment was trying to remind folks that the Mime group
spent a very painful year considering character set standardization and
gave up. And I believe nothing has changed since then.
As I said, I expect people will want to get more experience with
10646/Unicode before making any kind of standardization push. Of course,
I'd like to encourage them to get that experience earlier rather than
later...
My own suggestion is that when someone tries to use this list for pursuing
such topics, we should all privately send them a short note saying "that's
off the topic of this list and was considered by a working group several
years ago." Perhaps if enough of us do it, folks will get the idea?
Sounds good to me.
----------------------------
David Goldsmith
david_goldsmith(_at_)taligent(_dot_)com
Senior Scientist
Taligent, Inc.
10201 N. DeAnza Blvd.
Cupertino, CA 95014-2233