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Re: Unicode flame war (Was Re: Don't abolish non-unicode locales)



Hi,

At Fri, 3 Aug 2001 07:11:05 +0100,
David Starner <dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org> wrote:

> And I'm sorry
> that they can't agree on conversion tables, but there's nothing we can do
> about that.

Then do you have any idea to manage this situation?  I think this
decade will be the age of co-existence of UTF-8 and other encodings
and this problem really sucks.  (I imagine an automatic solution
that Microsoft's conversion table will become dominant and the
de-facto standard.  However, Microsoft's table has the most numbers
of differences than other tables.)

I have really no idea.  Thus, I cannot help giving up migrating
to UTF-8.


>> I understand I can't ask Germans to use double-width characters for
>> any non-ASCII characters.  Similarly, you can't ask Japanese to use
>> single-width non-letter-symbols (like triangle, star, rule elements,
>> and so on) and letters (like Greeks and Cyrillics).
>
> There's a slight difference between being totally wrong for a language, and
> making older texts look ugly and out of proportion.

You mean, double-width German looks ugly?  There doesn't exist such
a big difference.  And more, I never forced Germans to use doublewidth
diacritic alphabets while your discussion seems to be willing to force
Japanese people to use singlewidth non-letter-symbols and so on.


> Well, and efficency and so simple non-combining implementations could handle
> the language. But, yes, that's true. There's a lot of ways Unicode could
> have been better, but that would have killed it in practice.

Then do you think precombined diacritic alphabets in Unicode are evil?
I don't think so.  It makes it much easier for European languages speakers
to migrate into Unicode.

The problem is that the easiness of migration differs from language to
language.

---
Tomohiro KUBOTA <kubota@debian.org>
http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/
"Introduction to I18N"  http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/intro-i18n/



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