From: James Moore <banshee@...>
Date: 2006-06-14T08:56:29+09:00
Subject: Re: Unicode roadmap?

I suspect the Japanese posters on this list can answer better than I can,
but my impression is that Unicode is, shall we say, not highly thought of
outside Europe and North America.  The way they dealt with "Chinese"
characters was apparently more than a bit of a hack, and just doesn't work
very well in the real world.  Reading some of the explanations for glyphs
versus characters in Unicode just makes you shake your head.  What were they
thinking?  Sure doesn't pass the smell test, although I'll be the first to
admit I haven't exactly thought deeply about the subject.

There's another problem with Japanese - I've got a friend who's been dealing
with some issues around the fact that Japanese apparently innovates new
characters on a regular basis, and everyone is expected to use the new
characters.  (I believe this is called gaiji).  The concept of a fixed
character set apparently just isn't a good idea to start with.

[Awaiting corrections from people who actually know something about this
topic :-)...]
 
 - James Moore