From donn@hpfcrn.fc.hp.com Fri Jul 26 21:40:52 1991 Received: from relay.hp.com by dkuug.dk via EUnet with SMTP (5.64+/8+bit/IDA-1.2.8) id AA27379; Fri, 26 Jul 91 21:40:52 +0200 Received: from hpfcrn.fc.hp.com by relay.hp.com with SMTP (16.6/15.5+IOS 3.13) id AA05742; Fri, 26 Jul 91 12:40:59 -0700 Received: from hpfcdonn.fc.hp.com by hpfcrn.fc.hp.com with SMTP (16.7/15.5+IOS 3.22) id AA09989; Fri, 26 Jul 91 13:40:49 -0600 Message-Id: <9107261940.AA09989@hpfcrn.fc.hp.com> To: erik@sra.co.jp Cc: i18n@dkuug.dk Subject: Re: (i18n 111) locale category for sound In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 24 Jul 91 19:26:40 U." <9107241027.AA12768@sran8.sra.co.jp> Date: Fri, 26 Jul 91 13:40:48 MDT From: Donn Terry X-Charset: ASCII X-Char-Esc: 29 I certainly have a comment in this area: First: Eric, don't take this personally, you just set off something that has been stewing within me for a long, long time, which I believe needs to be said. We have crossed the boundary between standardizing what we would *like* to have be exisiting practice (we left actual existing practice behind long ago), and now are touching on areas which are either research projects or just wishful thinking. I suggest, strongly, that we concentrate on completing, solidly, all the areas we still don't have good solutions for (but at least we understand most of the problem) before ranging further afield. Messaging isn't done; some RE work remains; the comments made by Mike Karels reflect some very hard problems; we don't KNOW that we've got collation right yet (as Karels points out, we may have gone too far, but there are others who believe we havn't gone far enough), etc. Look, we don't even really have a workable international character set yet! Internationalization is a very real, very hard, and very important problem. Allowing it to become a grab bag for speculations and research is not in the interests of getting the known problems solved. I have NO problem with research, and to the extent that what you or anyone else is interested in research for the sake of some (far?) in the future result, that's probably worth doing. However, to the extent that it's not presented as research, it either can become something we "have" to do, just because it was mentioned, or become the part of someone else's expectation of what we have to do. I'd hate to have that get in the way of getting what's almost done, done. Donn