Date: Wed, 12 Mar 1997 11:31:25 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> To: jfieber@indiana.edu (John Fieber) Cc: ache@nagual.ru, terry@lambert.org, pam@polynet.lviv.ua, hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Q: Locale - is it possible to change on the fly? Message-ID: <199703121831.LAA27740@phaeton.artisoft.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.95q.970312083424.26807J-100000@fallout.campusview.indiana.edu> from "John Fieber" at Mar 12, 97 09:15:19 am
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Actually: > > On Tue, 11 Mar 1997, John Fieber wrote: > > > The Unicode 2.0 standard explicitly states multilingual computing > > > as the primary goal of the development effort. (First sentence in > > > section 1.1: Design Goals.) Here is your problem: you are not distinguishing "localization" from "multinationalization". Unicode is an enabling technology for localization, not multinationalization. There is no seperation of collation from specific locale. > The language issue aside, my point was that Unicode makes > significant headway in the arena of multilingual computing, which > I believe to be more common than Terry suggested, thanks largely > to the growing echange of electronic texts on the Internet. For > something very simple, should people be restricted to an ASCII > rendition of their name when signing an email message? This is a seperate issue. If I go to a Unicode character set representation of a name, I can not specify font encoding; unlike most character set encoding, Unicode, by virtue of the unification of the character set space seperate from the glyph encoding space, is relatively useless for what you propose. Do I render Satomi's name in Chinese or Japanese glyphs? I know which Satomi would prefer, because I know his national origin... by that is a covert channle not available to everyone, and it's certainly not one that should appear in an MUA listing of message senders. The largest application of multilingual documents outside an existing character set standard which may be round-tripped to and from Unicode is (1) translation services, and (2) linguistic scholarship. To be frank, I personally have use for both, but realize that the majority of the onus for the code is on me, not on the standard, because the multilingual application is a minority use. Regards, 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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