Date: Fri, 12 Jun 1998 00:42:55 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: mike@smith.net.au (Mike Smith) Cc: tlambert@primenet.com, mike@smith.net.au, itojun@iijlab.net, joy@urc.ac.ru, kline@tao.thought.org, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: internationalization Message-ID: <199806120043.RAA04594@usr09.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <199806112245.PAA01221@dingo.cdrom.com> from "Mike Smith" at Jun 11, 98 03:45:36 pm
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> > > This is clearly fallacious, as evidenced by Ito-san's earlier message.
> > > It is not uncommon for the ordinary asiatic citizen to want to use
> > > several locale's glyph sets in a single context.
> >
> > They can use a markup language to select fonts. Naturally, I'd prefer
> > the language be SGML rather than ISO 2022.
>
> If you're advocating the use of a markup language, ie. forcing the issue
> into the application domain, then you're buying out of the entire issue
> by suggesting that it's not required in the system domain.
>
> Not that I necessarily disagree, just that you're effectively moving
> the language/character set bigotry line rather than doing away with it.
Yes. That's quite true.
It is my contention that the vast majority of uses of a computer system
will occur in a single locale.
I'm moving the line so that the task before us is internationalization,
not multinationalization.
For a multi-language word processor, which is what would be used to
create the "Japanese Chinese Restraunt Menu", the onus is on the
word processor to do the multilingual support (the person making up
the menu falls into the category "translator", by the way).
This means that the word processor application author, not the system
library author, is responsible for the multinationalization code, and
it means that the word processing applciation, not every application
needing localization but not multinationalization, bears the compute
intensive burden of running the multinationalization code.
This removes the onus to support the input/output processing overhead
from other application programs.
Like "/bin/cat", for example.
PS: There is a TeX extension for multilingual word processing, using
Unicode available; the URL is http://www.ens.fr/omega/
It supports English, French, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, etc.; in
other words, everything Unicode supports.
Terry Lambert
terry@lambert.org
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.
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