Subject: [idn] Re: I don't want to be facing 8-bit bugs in 2013

From: Masataka Ohta <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Mar 2002 03:07:53 +0859 ()

John;

> >Anyway, with the fix, there is no reason to prefer Unicode-based
> >local character sets, which is not widely used today, than existing
> >local character sets already used world wide.
> 
> Of course there is.  What do you do when someone wants to combine charsets 
> from different nations? For example, say a Japanese man named Ohta married 
> a Mexican woman whose paternal surname was Col_n.  Their child's full surname, if they lived in Mexico, would be "Ohta y Col_n".  If that child wants to spell their surname correctly, they can't use a 
> just-European or just-Japanese character set; they probably need Unicode.

While marrying wih a Mexican woman is, if my wife and children allow, 
an fascinating idea, I'm saying, with your example (actually, European and
Japanese contexts happen to be compatible, but to follow your
example, let's assume they are not), the child must say
european-local-unicode and japanese-local-unicode at the same time,
which is impossible.

Just saying "unicode" is not enough to display "Ohta y Col_n" with
japanese local unicode-based character set.

Unicode is not useful in international context.

						Masataka Ohta

---

From: Thor Harald Johansen <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Mar 2002 20:01:43 +0100 (CET)

> Unicode is not useful in international context.

Most disagreements would disappear if all parties had identical
information in their posession. I belive that Unicode would cope with such
a situation. If your transmission medium supports 8-bit characters, I see
no problem in transmitting groups of octets representing Unicode glyphs
over that same medium, if proper information about this is provided in a
header. The last time I checked, UTF-? was a method of encapsulating the
full Unicode character set in a medium capable of carrying less bits.
-- 
Thor Harald Johansen
[email-masked]