From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Apr 5 15:44:59 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from phobos.illtel.denver.co.us (dsl-206.169.4.82.wenet.com [206.169.4.82]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 49E6837B6A3 for ; Wed, 5 Apr 2000 15:44:55 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from abelits@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us) Received: from localhost (abelits@localhost) by phobos.illtel.denver.co.us (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id PAA15263; Wed, 5 Apr 2000 15:45:56 -0700 Date: Wed, 5 Apr 2000 15:45:56 -0700 (PDT) From: Alex Belits To: Christian Weisgerber Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Unicode on FreeBSD In-Reply-To: <8cga09$2rja$1@bigeye.rhein-neckar.de> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On 5 Apr 2000, Christian Weisgerber wrote: > > > the most inclusive one in existence. > > > > It is. However if you look at the current efforts of its "adoption", it > > is not used as one. It's touted as the solution to all language-related > > problems, as a replacement of language/charset labeling infrastructure > > Who says so? Certainly not the Unicode enthusiasts I have met. > You are arguing against a strawman. I would be happy if it was a nonexistent point of view, however it happens to be exactly what I hear from people who are trying to "standardize on UTF-8" FTP, HTML, NNTP and even DNS. Their arguments? "who needs any other charsets or languages? just force everyone to replace them with UTF-8, put UTF-8 handling into all software and all languages-related problems will be solved". One of shining examples of this is someone Martin Duerst, however he is not alone there. [skipped] > > A claim that would be obviously absurd. > However, I do consider Unicode a sensible part of any new > implementation. ISO 2022 (and what other dinosaurs that may be > lurking in murky shadows) is a legacy solution that should die off. iso 2022 is a dinosaur -- it's inflexible. However labeling of charsets and languages in general is definitely necessary for any decent languages-handling functionality. Even if the charset is Unicode, languages still have to be labeled somewhere to make any use of the text in processing, and if labeling is unavoidable, multiple-charsets model is in no way inferior to Unicode, plus it allows easy addition of charsets and variants of them without Unicode consortium approval as long as something handles the charset and language names. -- Alex ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Excellent.. now give users the option to cut your hair you hippie! -- Anonymous Coward To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message