From: Jan Witt <ontologist_2000@...>
Date: 2002-06-26T23:19:29+09:00
Subject: Andy Roonie is perhaps excessively optimistic

To begin with, I do not know who Andy Roonie is,
either. 
I think it is worth while to point out some
of the serious problems relating to natural 
languages , bytes, fonts , chars , glyphs and all
that:
As I see it, the Unicode effort has been deeply
misguided right from the beginning and the Java
brotherhood has misunderstood the thing as well:
(1) in many languages there are more glyphs than
    letters in the alphabet, e.g. because of
ligatures,
    i.e. letters that get intertwined with their    
neighbors.( take Hindi or Arabic as examples)
   Unicode does not cater for this.
(2) Diacritics are not everywhere as simple as 
    accents in French, umlauts in German , which
    luckily could be fit into Latin-1.
(3) Some languages are written from left to right,
    some from the top down and texts may be mixed.
(4) Some historic languages are even written in    
bustrophic  style or even have symbols that face
    left or right depending on context like    
hieroglyphics.
Please consider that a multilingual text editor
must know about the [possibly varying] glyph bindings
of all of its
languages.
(5) Japanese, as you probably know, has the rich
choice 
    of kanji characters and the two kana alphabets,
    but no ligatures.
(6) Collating sequences are a nontrivial issue.
    In classical Spanish, e.g. LL and CH are
considered 
    separate characters. 
(7) Real and virtual keyboards are a major issue:
There are "latinized" keyboards that allow non-native 
speakers of Greek, Russian, Arabic, Hebrew etc. to
find the equivalents of, say, English letters in
the same places. Diacritics like accents also 
impact on the keyboard.
(8) UTF-8 and open-ended variable-length encoding 
is obviously the way to go, but I wish I knew who 
is looking after these things in Ruby and how far
they've got. (as far as I know, as of now, you do not
get cut and dried solutions in Java yet)
(9) How about Cgi scripts and Tk Guis in Urdu?

Jan



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