From: Austin Ziegler <halostatue@...>
Date: 2005-11-08T12:20:46+09:00
Subject: Re: Investigating Ruby - key limitations ?

On 11/7/05, Curt Sampson <cjs@cynic.net> wrote:
> On Tue, 8 Nov 2005, Daniel Wislocki wrote:
>> Actually what I've found is that most Japanese don't use Unicode at
>> all, but one of the other encodings like Shift-JIS.
> Actually, the more technical Japanese folks seem to actively hate
> Unicode, though I've never gotten a solid answer as to why that didn't
> involve confusing glyphs with their representations. (Which I guess I
> can see how it might upset you if your name came out with the wrong
> version of the character--but besides being damn rare, we have
> solutions for this.)

I've done a bit of work with Unicode and there are two primary
objections to the Unicode standard and representations by Japanese
developers and users (I am generalising to CJK below):

1. The politics. The Eastern scripts were treated rather badly initially
   and were painfully under-represented in Unicode 1.0 and probably
   Unicode 2.0. I don't think that CJK were adequately represented until
   Unicode 3.0, to be honest.

2. The political impact on representation. The existing CJK encodings
   were/are relatively efficient for storing CJK, although some forms
   used shift-in/shift-out byte markers, increasing the total number of
   symbols that could be represented in a relatively efficent storage
   format, even if processing time was a little slower.

   In contrast, UTF-8 and UTF-16 are relatively inefficient. IIRC, most
   Japanese encodings will use between 1 and 2 bytes per glyph. UTF-8
   will use between 3 and 4 bytes per glyph. UTF-16 uses either 2 or 4
   bytes per glyph.

-austin
--
Austin Ziegler * halostatue@gmail.com
               * Alternate: austin@halostatue.ca