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

Re: Postel's law, exceptions

• To: Rick Jelliffe <ricko@a...>
• Subject: Re: Postel's law, exceptions
• From: jcowan@r...
• Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2004 10:34:22 -0500
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <40054EFD.7070507@a...>
• References: <830178CE7378FC40BC6F1DDADCFDD1D10190E1B6@R...> <20040113213315.425bddb7.amyzing@t...> <20040114132545.GJ17723@m...> <40054EFD.7070507@a...>
• User-agent: Mutt/1.4.1i

Rick Jelliffe scripsit:

> They have *almost* been abstracted away: a Java "character" is UTF-16.
> Some Unicode characters require more than one Java "character" to
> represent then.  All *implementations* of characters have one (or more)
> underlying encoding.  A nominal getEncoding() method on a Java 1.n
> character stream even TeeWriter should always produce "UTF-16".

Well, if you like.  But *diversity* of encodings is lost.

> This should upset no-one, because some real characters may require
> more than one Unicode "character" to represent them, anyway.
> Take Vietnamese, please: if I have a u with a horn accent above plus
> a dot underneath [1], that is one real character (according to what
> people think of as characters) but three Unicode characters, 3 UTF-16
> characters, 6 bytes of storage.

Actually, you can also represent any Vietnamese letter with a single
Unicode (and UTF-16) character, U+1EF1 in this case.

The story with Vietnamese, for those who are curious, is that it has 12
vowel letters (a e i o u y a-breve a-circ e-circ o-circ o-horn u-horn),
each of which may bear one of five tone marks (acute, grave, hook above,
tilde, dot below).

-- 
It was impossible to inveigle           John Cowan <jcowan@r...>
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel           http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
Into offering the slightest apology     http://www.reutershealth.com
For his Phenomenology.                      --W. H. Auden, from "People" (1953)

• Follow-Ups:
  • Allowing Vietnamese (was Re: Postel's law, exceptions)
    • From: Rick Jelliffe <ricko@a...>

• References:
  • RE: Postel's law, exceptions
    • From: "Dare Obasanjo" <dareo@m...>
  • Re: Postel's law, exceptions
    • From: Amelia A Lewis <amyzing@t...>
  • Re: Postel's law, exceptions
    • From: John Cowan <cowan@m...>
  • Re: Postel's law, exceptions
    • From: Rick Jelliffe <ricko@a...>

• Prev by Date: Newbie XPath
• Next by Date: xml:base error handling
• Previous by thread: Re: Postel's law, exceptions
• Next by thread: Allowing Vietnamese (was Re: Postel's law, exceptions)
• Index(es):
  • Date
  • Thread