Subject: Re: (i18n 111) locale category for sound

From: Donn Terry <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 91 13:40:48 MDT

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