On Thu, 21 Mar 2002, Dan Kogai wrote:
> 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
...
> Seems like we share the common problem; The (local) government which
> has no idea on character encodings. I know we need to fix our
I'm not sure whether I have to agree with you that
Japanese nat'l body has ever made so big mistakes as Korean counterpart
did in pushing for encoding all 11,172 syllables in 10646/Unicode and
removing (compatibility) decomposition of cluster Jamos into basic Jamos
(which cannot be put back because Unicode decomposition/ composition was
permanently frozen for existing characters). To me it doesn't seem to have
done, but then you must be a much better judge on that than I'm. Anyway,
even if it has done so, it appears that the problem can be relatively
easily rectified by working with IRG to encode more Kanjis as necessary
because there are a lot of code points left for Kanjis in 10646/Unicode.
> government before Unicode but hey, those whom I voted for hardly ever
> win elections :(
<off topic>
I wish I had ever been able to vote in important nat'l elections
(but the candiate I rooted for got elected last time and even won .
Nobel peace prize :-).). One of remnants of the long dictatorship (even
after significant democratization has been in place for a decade) is
that Korean nationals living abroad are not allowed to vote.
</off topic>
> 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.
Isn't this contradictory to what you have written before? ^-^
Unicode/ISO 10646 has more Kanjis for 'wata' in 'Watanabe'-san than
any Japanese national standard character sets (needless to say, other
than the verbatim adopation of ISO 10646 by JIS), doesn't it? Then,
it certainly is a better character set than any of JIS character sets
for Japanese writing, isn't it? Granted, there seems to be an
incentive, if not huge nor compelling, to switch to Unicode :-).
> 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
> in Shift_JIS....
Despite the aforementioned advantage (which hasn't been advertised
as much as it may deserve) and because of the bad publicity given to
Han Unification, I believe it'll take a very long time to convert all
those web pages in legacy encodings to Unicode.
Even though Koreans do have a very strong incentive to go all the way to
Unicode as soon as possible, the inertia of legacy encodings is so
large that well over 95% (if not 99%) of Korean web pages and emails
are still in EUC-KR or its proprieatary upward compatible extension by
MS, X-Windows-949(UHC). In a sense, the latter is problematic and a
hindrance to a faster transition to UTF-8. Problematic because there
are many emails and web pages labeled as in EUC-KR but actually in
X-Windows-949 and a hindrance because it significantly cuts down the
incentive to move onto Unicode by becoming sorta 'de facto standard'
although devised as a stopgap measure back in 1995 before the
full scale deployment of Unicode. The only major web site in Korea in
UTF-8 I know of is <http://www.korean.go.kr> (The National Academy of
the Korean Language). They have to in order to deal with Middle Korean.
Perhaps, all of us Unicoders have to become evangelists for Unicode
and try to persuade major web sites to convert to Unicode. It's not
always necesary, but in Korean cases mentioned above (web pages in
X-Windows-949 mislabeled as EUC-KR), there's a clear need and advantage
to go to Unicode.
> 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
Sigh... yet another mailing list to join :-) I'll write to you off-line.
Jungshik Shin
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