[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message]

Re: UTF-8+names

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: UTF-8+names
• From: Tony Graham <Tony.Graham@S...>
• Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2003 00:07:07 +0100 (BST)
• In-reply-to: <r02000200-1028-1CD20FB2024311D8B3120003937A08C2@[192.168.124.11]>
• References: <20031019034635.91162.qmail@w...><r02000200-1028-1CD20FB2024311D8B3120003937A08C2@[192.168.124.11]>

"Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...> wrote at Sun, 19 Oct 2003 10:47:06 -0400:
> mc@x... (Mike Champion) writes:
...
> >exit :-) Tim's approach is taking a real, widespread problem and
> >offering a clean, layered solution -- essentially a character encoding
> >preprocessor -- rather than changing XML itself.
> 
> This makes me laugh hysterically, as the original notion of Unicode was
> to develop a big enough space that all the characters could live in
> happy co-existence without need for layering in the character space.

Actually, that's more the original ISO/IEC 10646 approach that didn't
pass its draft ballot in the period before the Unicode Consortium and
the ISO/IEC WG merged their repertoires.

(It also resembles recent fanciful unofficial proposals on the Unicode
list, but those threads petered out.)

> Unicode itself ran out of room and put in surrogates.  Now it seems

Yes.  I don't doubt that 65,000 characters seemed like enough back in
1988, or that a (fixed) character size larger than 16 bits would have
been an even tougher sell back when Unicode was getting established.

> that we've run out of patience and added yet another layer of
> processing in the middle.

Yet the proposal under discussion doesn't attempt naming either 65,000
characters or 1,000,000+, so I don't see why surrogates have anything
to do with it.

Regards,


Tony Graham
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XML Technology Center - Dublin
Sun Microsystems Ireland Ltd                       Phone: +353 1 8199708
Hamilton House, East Point Business Park, Dublin 3            x(70)19708

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: UTF-8+names
    • From: Tim Bray <tbray@t...>
  • Re: UTF-8+names
    • From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>

• References:
  • Re: UTF-8+names
    • From: Mike Champion <mc@x...>
  • Re: UTF-8+names
    • From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>

• Prev by Date: Re: UTF-8+names
• Next by Date: Re: UTF-8+names
• Previous by thread: RE: UTF-8+names
• Next by thread: Re: UTF-8+names
• Index(es):
  • Date
  • Thread