Re: Talk about Unicode Myths...

From: Jungshik Shin (jshin@mailaps.org)
Date: Wed Mar 20 2002 - 18:54:05 EST


On Wed, 20 Mar 2002, David Starner wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 21, 2002 at 05:55:41AM +0900, Dan Kogai wrote:

> > To me Unicode Consortium has already showed a big incompetence when it
> > introduced Surrogate Pair....

  What would it have done differently? Were you saying that it should
have begun with UTF-32 in the first place?

> > What was Han Unification for after all?
>
> Because Han ideographs are clearly one script, and a decision had to be
> made as to where the seperation between characters and variants was.

  Some Japanese have been very critical of Han Unification and given
arguments why it's problematic, which a number of people on various
forums including this list refuted (in my eyes).

  Unlike some Japanese critical of Han unification, I find myself
wishing IRG had gone farther in unification more often than not. When I
find out that some Chinese characters(Hanzi/Kanji/Hanja) not rendered
by my browser are just simple variants of Chinese characters for which
fonts installed on my computer have glyphs, I can't help wondering why
they're not unified. Perhaps because source separation rule...

  What's needed is a kind of transliteration table/mapping for
Chinese characters(Hanzi/Kanji/Hanja) so that various converters and
rendering engines can make a fallback if necessary,desired/requested
by end-users. This is for sure not an easy task, but IRG must have
accumulated necessary information (although not for this purpose) while
deciding whether or not to unify a set of variants. BTW, this is different
from mapping between simplified and traditional Chinese characters.

  Jungshik Shin



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