Cart
[Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries]
Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote: > And make no mistake, this is just the first step, not > the last. Unicode's got at least two more major iterations left in it > that will force changes in XML parsers if we tie XML that closely to > Unicode. It's not just blueberry but raspberry and blackberry too, and > maybe other flavors! It depends on how the Core decides to handle future versions. > For instance, Mongolian can be written in Cyrillic. > (Blame the Soviet Union for that, but it is a plausible workaround for > tag names in Mongolian.) Greek can be written in Latin characters, and is every day in Internet email. That doesn't make it a good idea. Mongolian script is now official in Mongolia, and its spelling conventions are totally different from the Cyrillic version: this is not like Azerbaijani or Serbian. > As a demonstration, I'd want to see at an absolute minimum that it was > possible to use a computer in such a language (e.g. Amharic, Tigre, > Khmer) without also having some competence in a more prevalent script > like Latin or Cyrillic. I'd also want it demonstrated that this was done > via a different character encoding, and not merely by a font mapping to > some ASCII superset. (This is how the limited Ethiopic software I've > actually seen has all worked.) This demand is not reasonable. People who need to use computers will use whatever kludges they can: that should not estop them from changing to Unicode when and as practical. One element of that practicability will be full support from markup languages. -- There is / one art || John Cowan <jcowan@r...> no more / no less || http://www.reutershealth.com to do / all things || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan with art- / lessness \\ -- Piet Hein
|
