tlug: A couple of questions about Unicode

["Jonathan Byrne" <jbyrne@example.com>]

I've been quite interested in the Unicode discussions here recently and
some of you seem quite knowledgeable about it, so I hope I can ask a couple
of questions here to further my basic understanding of it.

First, the complaints against Unicode seem to go something like this, to
greatly simplify various things I've read/heard:

A two-byte code only allows for 64K characters, but it is possible to have
characters sets with more characters than this, and Chinese will especially
suffer.

The answer to that goes like this:

Well, yes, Unicode can only specify 64K of unique codes, but Unicode does
not specify glyphs themselves.  That is left up to the character set itself
(if I'm correctly understanding what I've heard) itself.  Therefore,
Chinese is no problem.  The same Unicode character reference can map to a
different glyph for modern Chinese and classical Chinese within the same
document, by specifying the classical Chinese font in one place and the
modern Chinese font in another.

I realize this is a great simplification of the issue, but is this an
essentially accurate understanding of that issue, or am I really confused
by this?

Sign me

No Encoding Expert in Kawasaki :-)

Jonathan
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