From glenn@metis.com Tue Dec 22 20:16:23 1992 Received: from SAPIR.METIS.COM by dkuug.dk with SMTP id AA23756 (5.65c8/IDA-1.4.4j for ); Wed, 23 Dec 1992 07:16:48 +0100 Received: by sapir.metis.com (4.1/METIS-4.10) id AA09359; Wed, 23 Dec 92 01:16:23 EST Date: Wed, 23 Dec 92 01:16:23 EST From: glenn@metis.com (Glenn Adams) Message-Id: <9212230616.AA09359@sapir.metis.com> To: keld@login.dkuug.dk Cc: i18n@dkuug.dk, andrew@research.att.com In-Reply-To: Keld J|rn Simonsen's message of Sun, 20 Dec 92 16:38:08 +0100 <9212201538.AA25436@login.dkuug.dk> Subject: (i18n.179) plan 9 and 10646 X-Charset: ASCII X-Char-Esc: 29 >From: andrew@research.att.com > >i believe these system (design and migration) issues have been >essentially ignored in all the work and fuss on unicode/10646. I must add to my previous message regarding this. I strongly disagree with Andrew that system design and/or migration issues have been ignored. They were not ignored. Rather, they were determined to be outside the scope of the character set standard as such. The principle task facing the design of Unicode was (1) to enable the representation of all the world's languages, and (2) to insure interchangability with existing representations. The issue of software compatibility was explicitly not a goal. However, that doesn't mean the issue was ignored. In developing 10646-based systems, much work beyond defining the character set needs to occur. But that is above and beyond the immediate goals of designing Unicode or 10646. The Unicode Consortium does have an implementation subcommittee and desires as much participation from interested parties as possible. Perhaps if interested parties would be more active in this process, their needs would be better considered. As for the use of Byte Order Mark, there is a maxim in there Internet community which I think is useful here: "be liberal in what you receive, and conservative in what you transmit." For me that means prepending a BOM to all 10646 UCS2 data I create, and using some default heuristics when receiving a BOM-less 10646 stream. I agree that coming up with good solutions is going to take time; however, I believe that the important goals of Unicode have been met. Now it is up to us programmers to find good implementation solutions. I do know one thing: if all these implementation solutions had to be solved prior to publishing the standard, it would never have been published. Glenn Adams