Date: Wed, 5 Apr 2000 12:55:49 +0200 From: Anatoly Vorobey <mellon@pobox.com> To: Alex Belits <abelits@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us> Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Unicode on FreeBSD Message-ID: <20000405125549.05360@techunix.technion.ac.il> In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.20.0004041729500.11214-100000@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us>; from Alex Belits on Tue, Apr 04, 2000 at 05:34:55PM -0700 References: <Pine.LNX.4.20.0004041723030.11214-100000@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us> <Pine.LNX.4.20.0004041729500.11214-100000@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us>
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You, Alex Belits, were spotted writing this on Tue, Apr 04, 2000 at 05:34:55PM -0700: > On Tue, 4 Apr 2000, Alex Belits wrote: > > > > You mean, MIME multipart documents are better than Unicode if I, for instance, > > > want to handle Tolstoy's "War and Peace" with French quotes in the middle of > > > Russian sentences? > > > > > > I don't think so. > > > > This is what multipart format exists for -- to combine documents or > > sections in the document with possibly different metadata in the > > headers. The idea of "mail attachment" appeared later. > > I have to add that I agree that the way, MIME multipart is handled is > primitive and inconvenient for such applications, however this is not the > result of any flaw in its design, only of the lack of progress after > "everything should adopt Unicode" doctrine was declared. > One may argue > that the way that TeX handles such a text is even more inconvenient, > however even now it's most likely that TeX would be used for this kind of > typesetting. But we're *not* talking about typesetting -- rather about multilingual text handling. TeX, indeed, does typesetting and thus solves the wrong problem. In "real life" someone who needs to handle text with Russian and French in it -- type it, send it, read it, study it, etc. -- not *typeset* it -- won't use TeX for it, but will rather walk over to the Windows machine and fire up Word. This is the solution that's used in "real life" right now -- and incidentally, one of the reasons it's become so annoyingly common to email Word files as some kind of universal text standard. I don't like this, but currently the Unix world doesn't have a good alternative to offer. UTF-8 changes that, and I think that's a wonderful thing. It's fine for you to talk about what would happen if MINE were to evolve into a general-purpose text-marking standard powerful enough to handle a Czech word inside a French sentence, but that didn't happen, which means that neither you nor anyone else took it there. Frankly, I don't think MIME would have been up for the task anyway, but that's a moot point because it just didn't happen. -- Anatoly Vorobey, mellon@pobox.com http://pobox.com/~mellon/ "Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly" - G.K.Chesterton To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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