-----Original Message-----
From: Dan Oscarsson <Dan.Oscarsson@trab.se>
To: Unicode List <unicode@unicode.org>
Cc: unicode@unicode.org <unicode@unicode.org>
Date: Friday, August 21, 1998 7:48 AM
Subject: Re: Is there a UTF that allows ISO 8859-1 (latin-1)?
>No, the only important character set for me is UCS. And currently I use
only the
>first 256 codes of UCS as they are all I need, for the moment. Those codes
happen
>to be the same as ISO 8859-1.
They are "all you need" for the moment? While your personal needs are
important (to the creators of these encodings as well as to you), the
personal needs of a western European are no *more* important than the
personal needs of a Korean, a Russian, a Greek, a Thai, a Japanese, a
Vietnamese.... They all have legacy files, too, and Latin-1 is not as
important to them as their own legacy encodings. A lot of European
multinational corporations that do business worldwide wouldn't be helped
much by a Latin-1-centric new UTF, either. It would end up as just an
additional step between national encodings and universal encoding,
increasing the legacy complexity.
Even from your own individual European perspective, how long are you willing
to go without using the "Euro" character? That's not available in Latin-1,
so a Latin-1-centric UTF wouldn't be "all you needed" for very much longer.
It surely wouldn't meet the needs of European multinationals, either. Then
we'd just have another legacy transition to make, from a Latin-1-centric UTF
to a Latin-0 (Latin-9) -centric UTF. It's hard to imagine that this is what
most Europeans would want.
__Glen__
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