Date: Wed, 5 Apr 2000 10:10:09 -0700 (PDT) From: Alex Belits <abelits@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us> To: Anatoly Vorobey <mellon@pobox.com> Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Unicode on FreeBSD Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.20.0004050950210.11214-100000@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us> In-Reply-To: <20000405125549.05360@techunix.technion.ac.il>
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On Wed, 5 Apr 2000, Anatoly Vorobey wrote:
> > 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.
It solves exactly the same problem -- displaying information. Unicode
does NOTHING to support any other functionality that is required for true
multilingual text processing. You can't even do a hyphenation of unicode
text -- you will have to guess, which language rules should apply.
> 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
This only happens because those people use Word, and Word happens to use
Unicode. Well, Word uses a lot of things that I consider to be stupid and
poorly designed -- its popularity is based definitely not on technical
merit.
> -- and incidentally, one of the reasons it's
> become so annoyingly common to email Word files as some kind of
> universal text standard.
Word is not a standard, it's a format forced on a lot of people by some
pretty shady practice of certain company that in few recent days was
mentioned often enough to make it pointless to be described again.
> 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.
UTF-8 provides a way to display a lot of characters -- that's all. And
this is nowhere close to being enough -- if we want to be superior to
pretty-pictures-oriented Windows software, we need to provide advantages
over it, not absorb its weaknesses. We need to provide multilingual
functionality, not just multilingual display -- if that will be done,
half-assed languages support in Windows/Word will look like a sad joke.
> 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.
What do you mean, "didn't happen"? Who is here writing software but we
ourselves? I am trying to explain why the development in that area should
be done despite stupid decisions made by IETF precisely because I expect
it to be done as the result -- by myself or by others. I will be happy to
start this work, however without others' input I am afraid that it will
become yet another thing based on idiosyncrasy rather than on good design
ideas -- sad example of Java makes me feel rather uneasy about starting a
thing that no one seems to understand or care about.
--
Alex
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Excellent.. now give users the option to cut your hair you hippie!
-- Anonymous Coward
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