Bjorn Stabell <unicode@exoweb.net> wrote:
> According to this news item (in Chinese), China rejected HK's
> application to use Unicode, and instead says they have to use
> ISO 10646-1:2000 or GB18030. Apparently they don't like to
> standardize on a standard controlled by an organization of
> commercial companies, like Unicode.
Actually, the PRC stance is that GB 13000.1 is their version of ISO 10646-1
which, as we all know, is identical to Unicode. Since GB 18030-2000 is
code-point compatible with GB 2312, this is now becoming the encoding of
official choice.
> This is confusing. Nobody implements ISO 10646-1:2000 as
> such, they just implement Unicode, right? I thought the two
> standards were equivalent?
Yep - they're identical in character content, although Unicode provides a
lot more information, such as the various TR's, etc.
> We're using Unicode because of
> practical reasons, because there's a lot of applications supporting
> it and it solves the character set problem. What do you suggest
> we do, being based in Beijing, China?
No-brainer: use Unicode. However, from January, you *must* allow for
import/export of GB 18030-2000 data, so watch out for that.
> In December, the Chinese will go to Taiwan to try to settle on a
> common encoding.
And they'll agree to use GB 18030? Big-5? CNS 11643? I'd love to see a
common encoding across both the mainland and the various islands, but as
far as I can see, only Unicode/ISO 10646 can provide this without huge
investment. And that's without any political agendas to further muddy the
waters.
Brendan
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:21:15 EDT