off-topic? [was Re: Examples of translated RFCs]

Doug,
you say you imagine the following exchange is "off-topic for IETF". 
Please reread the RFC 3066 bis, and your own accompanying proposed 
registry accepted by the IESG after the Tunis deal. And reread RFC 
3935. _You_ trapped the IETF in pretending it is competent in matter 
of language identification, language tagging, script issues, national 
lingual policies, etc. to the point to take the world leadership (and 
the RFC 3935 accompanying responsibilities) with the mission to 
influence people to design, use and manage the Internet in that area.
And now you come and say this is off-topic?

Obviously it WAS off-topic. But you made it a core topic for the 
IETF. Saying it is off-topic now will not address it. I was 
interested in knowing how you are going to assume it. Now we start 
understanding.
Masataka Ohta does not discuss an ISO matter. He discusses an IETF 
langtag issue. I fully agree the IETF does not count the expertise 
and cross-expertise, and most probably the interest, necessary to 
seriously discuss IETF langtags. Nevertheless every IETF langtag 
issue is now going to escalate to this mailing list, the IESG and 
ulitmately to the IAB as the self-assumed world's authority on the matter.
I used the appeal now in limbo to make the IESG clarify their (your) 
contradictory position. I feel that a community having a problem to 
decide between ASCII Courier and ASCII PDF/A for its own use may not 
be very excited about deciding for the world how to best support 
kanji and hanzi, etc.
jfc




At 08:46 07/12/2005, Doug Ewell wrote:
> Masataka Ohta <mohta at necom830 dot hpcl dot titech dot ac dot jp> wrote:
> > > since most computers sold all over the world now
> > > come with at least one perfectly good Unicode-based font with
> > > Chinese-style glyphs and another with Japanese-style glyphs.
> > Now, you admit that the problem does exist.
> I admit there are stylistic differences between the way the *same 
> characters* are written in the Chinese and Japanese 
> traditions.  Anyone who knows about East Asian writing knows 
> that.  I do not admit there is a problem with unifying them in a 
> character-based (not glyph-based) encoding.
> > I can't print Japanese characters in China where Chinese-style
> > glyphs are used by default.
> No, you can't print Japanese *glyphs* in that situation.  Characters 
> and glyphs are not the same thing.
> > With both Chinese and Japanese glyphs are available, ISO 2022 works
> > perfectly fine with corresponding Chinese and Japanese character
> > sets. On the other hand, language tags are useless from the beginning
> > to distinguish characters. One can represent some content in Japanese
> > language by ASCII, Japanese characters or Chinese characters.
> If you (or your software) can use the distinction between ISO 
> 2022-JP and Big-5, or EUC-TW, or CNS 11643, or whatever to determine 
> whether to display Japanese or Chinese glyphs, you (or your 
> software) can do the same by using the distinction between "ja" and 
> "zh".  If you can use ISO 2022 controls to switch between "the 
> Japanese repertoire" and "the Chinese repertoire," you can do the 
> same with language tags.  This is a question of style, not legibility.
> If you are saying?I'm not sure about this?that the same Ie ISO 10646 
> code point needs to be displayed in both the Japanese and Chinese 
> glyphic traditions in the same Japanese-langauge text, and that only 
> ISO 2022 is adequate to indicate which glyphs to display, then I 
> ask: how is this problem solved in handwritten text?
> > > I think you do your countrymen a disservice by claiming that they are
> > > incapable of reading kanji printed in a Chinese-style font.
> > Red herring.
> >
> > Just as most native users of Latin alphabet can read Greek alphabet,
> > most Japanese can read Chinese glyphs, which is not the point at all.
> Actually I think you are being too kind to most native users of the 
> Latin alphabet.  They can certainly read Greek Î', because the Latin 
> A is derived from it.  They might get terribly confused by Greek Î? 
> and Ρ and Χ, which are not equivalent to the Latin letters they 
> resembleâ?"unless, of course, they are familiar with the use of 
> Greek letters in professional or fraternal organizations, which is 
> its own red herring.
> Most scholars of writing systems disagree with your premise that 
> Chinese hanzi and Japanese kanji are two separate writing systems in 
> the same way that Latin and Greek are separate.  Latin and Greek are 
> not simply glyph variants of one another.
> > You should admit that ISO 10646 useless for internationalization.
> I do not.  ISO 10646 is a cornerstone of modern software internationalization.
>
> I imagine this is off-topic for IETF.

_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf