There might be a wee bit more Unicode around in Japan than people
realize. Anyone using MS Office or Windows NT/2000/XP is using Unicode
under the hood; the same is true for others. Many servers keep Unicode
on the back-end (that way they can mix data from different languages
without loss), and then serve up the data in whatever code pages the
browser is configured for. Etc.
Mark
—————
Γνῶθι σαυτόν — Θαλῆς
[For transliteration, see http://oss.software.ibm.com/cgi-bin/icu/tr]
----- Original Message -----
From: "Dan Kogai" <dankogai@dan.co.jp>
To: "Jungshik Shin" <jshin@mailaps.org>
Cc: <unicode@unicode.org>
Sent: Thursday, March 21, 2002 01:23
Subject: Re: Talk about Unicode Myths...
> On Thursday, March 21, 2002, at 10:43 , Jungshik Shin wrote:
> >> Amendment 5 to 10646 was the culmination
> >> of the comic opera which resulted in 11,172 Hangul syllables in
> >> the standard, despite the fact that everyone knew that that was
> >> insufficient for Old Korean, and that combining jamo would have
> >> to be used for that, anyway.
> >
> > I can't agree with you more on this. A very clear example of
> > the incompetence and short-sightedness of Korean nat'l standard
body
> > which
> > vehemently pushed it thru. Arguably this significantly delayed
support
> > of Middle Korean (on most platforms and by most programs) by
blinding
> > most developers to the fact that Hangul, too, needs to be treated
like
> > Indic/Thai and other complex scripts because 'modern day-to-day'
needs
> > are fulfilled by 11,172 precomposed Hangul syllables. Much more
> > arguably,
> > having only 2,350 Hangul syllables (for the sake of compatibilty
with
> > legacy KS X 1001) might have sped up a little support of other
complex
> > scripts in some cases.
>
> Seems like we share the common problem; The (local) government
which
> has no idea on character encodings. I know we need to fix our
> government before Unicode but hey, those whom I voted for hardly
ever
> win elections :(
> One of the reasons that Unicode is yet to gain popularity in
Japan is
> the fact that Unicode doesn't enhance DOMESTIC writing, unlike
Hangul.
> The Japanese lack the strong incentive to go for Unicode. Unicode
> indeed needs a killer app (or a killer site; such site that
everyone
> finds imperative AND needs UTF-8 to view the page). Till then, most
of
> the web pages would stay EUC-JP (i.e. www.yahoo.co.jp ; EUC-JP is
easier
> on CGIs), mails would stay ISO-2022-JP, and most of the text files
stay
> Shift_JIS....
>
> Dan the Taxpayer Who's Paying too Much for Too Little Outcome
>
> P.S. Jungshik, seems like you are a Korean expert who knows about
> character encodings. If you know perl as well, would you help us on
> Encode module, that will enable next official perl to handle not
only
> Unicode but also other Encodings? If so please join perl-
> unicode@perl.org
>
>
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Thu Mar 21 2002 - 12:03:35 EST