Re: Mailing list INSOFT-L

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

> Sorry if this is old news to you folks, but I just stumbled on
> a mailing list of interest to the ietf-charsets group.
> Here is an example posting pulled from their archive.
> This is the same group that is starting up the journal _I18N_.
> They are looking for a new moderator, by the way.

If you are interested in truely internationalized (that is, not
inter-European multilingualized) text processing, use ISO-2022-INT-*
(Internet Draft will soon be availale) or ICODE (described in my paper).

Note also that file format which is not ASCII compatible will be
unacceptable to most of the people.

> p.s. This article contains a good summary of the Unicode vs. Japan
> situation, as seen by the West.  Mr. Ohta's position is apparantly
> shared by many in the East, although they express it less forcefully.
> The key worry is achieving pleasing display of mixed Chinese/Korean/Japanese
> text, which requires encoding language (or equivalently, font).

The issue is achieving "correct" display.

> The Japanese position is that this should be covered by any character
> set standard;

It depends on the definition of the word "character", which I don't
think so important point. The notion of "character" in the
internationalized environment is not useful.

> the West's position is that this is external to the
> standard.

The West's position, it seems to me from the recent discussion in itef-822,
is that the information is external to anything.

> Another problem is that the Han unification was not done
> with the politeness needed for success in Japan.

As I'm impolite, it does not matter. Han unification is bad regardless of
how it was done. Note that providing several unification tables is good
as long as they are designed to be useful (Unicode's unification is not
useful for purposes such as searching)  and user are not forced to
use them.

> Mr. Ohta, am I close?

Mostly.

						Masataka Ohta