RE: Unicode progress

[Masataka Ohta <mohta@necom830.cc.titech.ac.jp>]

> >It seems to me that English and Greek characters need separate code points
> >because their visual appearance is significantly different, not because
> >they are from different languages.
> 
> Actually, Dan, a lot of other issues aside, you have hit on one of the
> critical issues here.   Ohta-san has responded on this, but let me try a
> bit of a generalization.

As I only responded to ietf-charsets, if people on WNILS want to read
my previous mail, please read backlogs of innosoft.com:ietf-charsets.dir.

> (1) "visual appearance is significantly different" is largely in the eye
> of the beholder.

I agree. And I think we shouldn't continue endless debate on this point.

Instead, we should clarify the purpose of encoding.

	1) encoding which only assures just barely recognizable quality

or

	2) encoding which assures the quality of plain text as commonly
	seen with native users in the bit-map-display-rich and LBP-rich
	environment

The purpose depends on actual applications, of course.

But, I think, if "barely recognizable quality" is the target, we can
transliterate our non-English native languages to use ASCII characters only.

As for whois, for example, if we want to use whois database to print
labels of direct mails for advertisement, we will need the quality of 2).
Instead, if reachability of material mails are necessary, we only need
ASCII. So, why internationalize?

I'd like to ask whois people on thier intended quality.

Aren't the Microsoft and Apple pushing Unicode with quality of 1) to let
much more people use word processing software? :-)

The other factor is the trade off between cost and quality. But, I think
I have already shown (in ietf-charsets ML) the cost of high quality
internationalization is minimal with IUTF encoding (if UTF-2 encoding is,
at all, acceptable).

> There is actually a community of objections to UTF-2.  They are based
> on:

I replay to ietf-charsets only on this issue.

							Masataka Ohta