Hello Unicoders,
What follows is the report from April's Eighth International Unicode Conference
in Hong Kong. I sincerely hope you can join us for the ninth conference in San
Jose in September. Also, a reminder to get those proposal submissions in for
the ninth!
My best regards,
Lisa
The Eighth International Unicode Conference was held April 18 and 19, in Hong
Kong. This conference was the largest regional Unicode conference ever, with
over 50% more attendance than the '94 workshop in Tokyo. It was truly an
international conference with most attendees from the Asia/Australia region,
but with strong American and considerable European presence. One attendee came
from the Middle East.
Mr. Jun'ichiro Kida, critic of culture and literature in Japan gave the first
keynote presentation entitled "'Rubi' The Key to Japanese Kanji Culture". Mr.
Kida gave us a fascinating glimpse into the culture of Japanese writing,
reading, and literacy, including a review of many different ways of writing
Japanese (not all of them in actual use). The second keynote was a marketing
view of the paramount importance of multilanguage support for doing business in
Asia. This was given by Ms. Miyuki Suzuki, Marketing Director of Reuters Asia
and provided a clear and compelling case for standards-oriented, mainstream
multilingual support as a key ingredient in keeping an information-based
product competitive.
The core of the conference was in the technical presentations. It was clear
that Asia is moving ahead on Unicode implementations. There were several
strong presentations on Unicode support in Japan, China, Singapore and
Taiwan. Also clear was the importance of Web applications. Several vendors
demonstrated how Unicode support is a natural for Web applications, and a
lively impromptu discussion ensued on the best ways to internationalize the
Web. The Web track was one of the most productive series of sessions.
The conference logistics were excellent and attendees really enjoyed the
conference program and location.
Those of us who participated in Hong Kong look forward to three more very
worthwhile days this September in San Jose.
Track/Session Chairs:
Lloyd Honomichl
Mike Ksar
Michael Kung
John McConnell
Mike McKenna
Lisa Moore
Misha Wolf
Conference Review Board:
Asmus Freytag
John McConnell
Lisa Moore
Ken Whistler
Misha Wolf
Conference management by: Global Meeting Services
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