Re: RE : Re: [tlug] "strange antipathy towards Unicode" . . . . . . . . (was: Re: Learn a Variety of Languages)

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

Actually, it was just a bad example I chose, due to my misspelling and
the fact that I didn't have a French dictionary handy. However, if I've
done my research properly this time, you cannot tell which of the following
words are in French and which are in English:

    sculpture
    plus
    accident
    long
    deja vu

Note also that another complaint the Japanese have, name mutilation, has
been going on for a long time. Not only have we not been able to display
the English name "Bronte" properly in ASCII, but even the Japanese have
been mutilating some names in their own national standard character
sets, because the variations on certain glyphs are just not there.

In the end, you can always find another application for which an
existing character set / character encoding / whatever standard will not
work. The important thing, if you want to be part of the world community
of computing, is to get a global standard that everyone accepts, is
reasonably easy to implement, and that doesn't do too bad a job.

I think it's a lot better to have your average database-backed web site,
with a minimal amount of Internationalization work, handle all but an
infitesimal portion of common Japanese than it is to have a separate
standard that nobody will implement that will cause most web sites not
to handle Japanese well at all. Some people disagree with me.

cjs
--
Curt Sampson       <cjs@example.com>        +81 90 7737 2974