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Date:      Tue, 4 Apr 2000 17:22:53 -0700 (PDT)
From:      Alex Belits <abelits@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us>
To:        freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Unicode on FreeBSD
Message-ID:  <Pine.LNX.4.20.0004041722140.11214-100000@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us>

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On Tue, 4 Apr 2000, Garance A Drosihn wrote:

> I don't understand what possible benefit there is in having *NO*
> options to deal with all the language-characters in the world. Even
> if unicode isn't perfect, it is a damn sight better than nothing.

  The existing "market" of multilingual application is so small, and it's
based on so simplistic requirements (to be able to display and print
characters, and make multilingual "web pages"), that even solution so much
flawed as standardization on Unicode can survive. Unicode is positioned as
the _replacement_ for languages/charsets handling infrastructure -- "we
know all the characters, so we can write all the words, right?".

  As demands for sopisticated processing of multilingual texts will
increase, "Unicode-only" systems will demonstrate their ridiculous limits
and ambiguity, however if no multiple-charset/multiple-language
infrastructure in libraries, formats, protocols, text and document editors
and interpreter-based programming languages will be in place, there will
be no way to improve the situation. This is why I think that the design of
the language support infrastructure is an extremely important taks, and if
it will succeed, efficient, modularized support of charsets/encodings,
including Unicode, can be implemented painlessly.

> If some specific change for unicode does break things, then I can
> see arguing that change.  I can't fathom why anyone would argue
> against unicode support per se.

  I am not against the support for Unicode. I just never have seen an
attempt of providing usable Unicode support that didn't leave scorched
earth to any other possible attempt of supporting multilingual environment
or even single-charset environment other than iso8859-1 or Unicode. I
think that instead of blind following the ideas of "one charset" we need
to design something that can painlessly accept various charsets in the
same document/stream/etc (just like MIME does in its own clumsy way). If
Unicode support will be implemented on top of it, I will be the last
person to criticize it.

-- 
Alex





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