Re: Talk about Unicode Myths...

From: Dan Kogai (dankogai@dan.co.jp)
Date: Wed Mar 20 2002 - 15:55:41 EST


On Thursday, March 21, 2002, at 03:55 , John H. Jenkins wrote:
> There's an issue because Ohta-san (and a few others) hate Unicode with
> a passion. This is an old argument which has been made by a number of
> Japanese for years, insulted that a bunch of American engineers presume
> to design a system to display Japanese and unifying it with Chinese.
> Most Japanese disagree with them, and the resistance to Unicode even in
> Japan is decreasing as engineers there see that it doesn't really mean
> American (or Chinese) cultural imperialism. Unfortunately, Ohta-san
> can still get himself a hearing on a number of Internet-related
> committees.

   How can you be so sure that "Most Japanese disagree"? Have you
actually taken a poll? I happen to be a Japanese and even I am not sure
how much beloved or hated Unicode is here. Isn't this kind of attitude
that makes people like Ohta-san angry?
   Don't take me as an Anti-Unicodist (as a matter of fact, I am a
maintainer of Encode module of Perl). I second the philosophy of a
single character encoding that (tries to) covers as many worlds as
possible. It is its implementations and policies that I can't help
raising my eyebrows.
   To me Unicode Consortium has already showed a big incompetence when it
introduced Surrogate Pair.... What was Han Unification for after all?

Dan the Man with Too Many Encodings to Support



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