Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: UTF-8, OSTA-UDF [why?], Unicode, and miscellaneous gibberish | Date | Thu, 21 Aug 1997 02:18:32 +0200 (MET DST) | From | (Erik Corry) |
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> The problem is that lots of the decisions on asian encodings in Unicode > were made by non-asians. Many of the decisions on character unifications > are non-sensical. > > Basically Japanese look at Unicode as something forced upon them by > idiots who only understand single byte encodings and european languages > with latin based character sets.
People interested in this(!) should use Deja News to take a look at the long discussion from 1995 that started off as "Fuck the Asians" and ended up being called "Han unification in Unicode". For example, take a look at the posting by Glenn A. Adams under <http://xp5.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?recnum=2004085&search=thread&threaded=1&server=db95q23> and the postings by Martin Duerst on the subject.
The impression I got from the whole discussion is that the Japanese objections to Han unification are not tenable, and that Han Unification was a process initiated in the Far East and approved of by JISC the Japanese standards organisation.
Most people have objections to decisions made in Unicode. This is inevitable in a standard of this size, on a subject that raises such emotions. Many of the perceived inconsistencies arise from the need to convert losslessly from other encodings to Unicode and back.
> >From what I understand the Russians hate Unicode because their nice simple > single-byte KOI8 encoding became mangled into double bytes.
Inconvenient. The same thing happened to Latin-1 in UTF-8.
> And it's not even sorted in Russian alphabetic order!
That seems a little gratuitous, even given their (correct) opinion that alphabetical ordering problems cannot be solved merely by picking the correct encoding.
There is no character set encoding in which the German characters are in alphabetical order. And if there were, the same characters would be out of order in Swedish, where the same characters exist but are ordered differently. You get used to it.
For that matter, ASCII is not in alphabetical order. For that the order would have to be AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIi etc.
> Chinese primarily use BIG5 encoding. At least, they do on the web :-)
This is their prerogative. However BIG5 is not suitable as an interchange-encoding for Linux (at least not outside China).
-- Erik Corry erik@arbat.com http://inet.uni-c.dk/~ehcorry/
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