Unicode is not usable in international context.
...
It would not be worth replying to these threadworn and repeated
assertions by Mr. Ohta, except that some members of this list may not
be that familiar with Unicode. Clearly Unicode is being used
successfully in a huge variety of products in international contexts.
For more information on the CJK repertoire (which is the part Mr. Ohta
objects to), see http://www.unicode.org/unicode/faq/han_cjk.html.
Mark
—————
Γνῶθι σαυτόν — Θαλῆς
[For transliteration, see http://oss.software.ibm.com/cgi-bin/icu/tr]
http://www.macchiato.com
----- Original Message -----
From: "Masataka Ohta"
<mohta(_at_)necom830(_dot_)hpcl(_dot_)titech(_dot_)ac(_dot_)jp>
To: "Robert Elz" <kre(_at_)munnari(_dot_)OZ(_dot_)AU>
Cc: <idn(_at_)ops(_dot_)ietf(_dot_)org>; <ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org>;
<iesg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org>;
<iab(_at_)isi(_dot_)edu>
Sent: Wednesday, March 20, 2002 07:58
Subject: [idn] Re: I don't want to be facing 8-bit bugs in 2013
Kre;
| IDNA does _not_ work, because Unicode does not work in
International
| context.
This argument is bogus, and always has been. If (and where)
unicode
is defective, the right thing to do is to fix unicode.
Unicode is not usable in international context.
There is no unicode implementaion work in international context.
Unicode is usable in some local context.
There is some unicode implementaion work in local contexts.
However, the context information must be supplied out of band.
And, the out of band information is equivalent to "charset"
information, regardless of whether you call it "charset" or
not.
So, stop arguing against unicode (10646) - just fix any problems
it has.
Fix is to supply context information out of band to specify which
Unicode-based local character set to use.
With MIME, it is doable by using different charset names for
different local character set.
See, for example, RFC1815.
As for IDN, it can't just say "use charset of utf-7" or "use charset
of utf-8".
IDN can say "for Japanese, use charset of utf-7-japanese".
Or, if you insist not to distinguish different local character sets
by
MIME charset names, IDN can say "use charset of utf-7, but, for
Japanese, use Japan local version of utf-7" and somehow specify
how a name is used for Japanese.
Anyway, with the fix, there is no reason to prefer Unicode-based
local character sets, which is not widely used today, than existing
local character sets already used world wide.
Masataka Ohta