From: YTang0648@aol.com
Date: Wed Nov 05 2003 - 14:58:45 EST
In a message dated 11/5/2003 11:27:42 AM Pacific Standard Time,
dewell@adelphia.net writes:
My company is not the best example here; we're well behind the curve
when it comes to Unicode, and i18n/L10n generally.
That said, I think it would be much faster and less error-prone, for a
company adding Unicode support to a product for the first time, to
support the entire Unicode range from the outset, rather than supporting
just the BMP in the alpha stage and then "adding" support for
supplementary characters. For UTF-8 in particular, I can't imagine why
one would choose to implement the 1-, 2-, and 3-byte forms in one stage
and add the 4-byte forms in a later stage.
The other reason, is untill recently in Unicode 3.1 and 3.2. There are no
characters defined beyond BMP. Even as today, while there many characters defined
beyond the BMP in unicode 4.0, the software vendor may not care about those
market which need those characters any way. In that case, the priority to
support those are pretty low.
From my understanding, the only major market which mandate Surrogate support
is only China. I never heard European, Japanese, or Korean govements mandate
unicode support beyond BMP. China is the only one which mandate Plan 2 and the
supprot of surrogate mapping with GB18030 . Have you see any marketing
requirment from other countries / region require unicode surrogate support?
I am not saying there are no need in other places. I am saying the surrogate
support (or the lack of it) in the software do not have huge "commercial"
impact in other regions.
If you think Surrogate support is very important. Then IUC25 is a good chance
for you to talk to "goverment" people. Maybe you should suggest them to put
surrogate support into a law as what China did in 2000. (not really, they only
require GB18030 support, but that "imply" Surrogate.)
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
==================================
Frank Yung-Fong Tang
System Architect, Iñtërnâtiônàl Dèvélôpmeñt, AOL Intèrâçtívë Sërviçes
AIM:yungfongta mailto:ytang0648@aol.com Tel:650-937-2913
Yahoo! Msg: frankyungfongtan
John 3:16 "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that
whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
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