From: David Balmain <dbalmain.ml@...>
Date: 2006-06-14T09:12:15+09:00
Subject: Re: Unicode roadmap?

On 6/14/06, James Moore <banshee@banshee.com> wrote:
> 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 :-)...]

There is a good summary of the han unification controversy on wikipedia;

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification