Re: [tlug] Re: Unicode

[Charles Muller <acmuller@example.com>]

Shimpei Yamashita wrote:

> Jim, what I don't quite understand is this: exactly what problem is Unicode
> meant to solve anyway? 

I am sure that Jim can provide his own answer, but I think the answer to
this question is obvious: It is meant to solve the problem of incompatible
coding systems, which was a severe impediment to the exchange of
information. Especially in the case of Han characters, which have a high
degree of graphical and semantic equivalence, it was ridiculous to continue on
in a situation where people using computers in Japan, Korea, China, and
Taiwan could not talk to each other.

> Given that, what rationale went into the decision to
> combine certain glyphs between countries that cause caused so much grief among
> your opponents? 

Jim's opponents? I was under the impression that Jim did not have an enemy
in the world. How can you fight with a bloke like that?

> It's easy to dismiss Unicode opponents as nationalist
> counter-revolutionaries, but it isn't clear to me (yet) that the Unicode camp
> has addressed their grievance adequately.

As far as I can tell, it is because the grievances are largely based on
misunderstandings of what Unicode is supposed to do. Almost all of the
grievances that I have heard from anti-Unicode people have been quibbles
about small, idiosyncratic differences in glyph representation, which can
very easily be handled at the level of font, and thus there is no problem
assigning a single code point.

There are of course a very small percentage of _bimyou_ cases where
expert-level debate needs to take place to determine whether or not a
character is a variant of another (and if so, what kind of variant). But the
fact that more of these did not get hashed out at the early stages is again,
from what I understand, due more to the problems of non-cooperation rather
than unawareness or arbitrary forcing on the part of the Unicode consortium.

The other thing that I would like to stress is that from the early days up
to the present, the Unicode consortium has been quite open to suggestions
and reasonable proposals set forth by properly accredited groups and
individuals, and therefore the Unicode character set continues to grow and
be refined.

I don't say that Unicode is problem-free. But I can tell you that people
like myself who work with classical East Asian literary texts would still be
in the dark ages if Unicode had not come along. Maybe some day in the future
Unicode will be replaced with something better, and if so, that's fine. But
to have left things in the fragmentary form they were would have been
absurd.

Chuck

---------------------------
Charles Muller  <acmuller@example.com>
Faculty of Humanities,  Toyo Gakuen University
Digital Dictionary of Buddhism and CJKV-English Dictionary [http://www.acmuller.net]
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