From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Tue Sep 28 2004 - 22:59:50 CST
<gaudivenetia at highstream dot net> wrote:
> Here is the assumption.
>
> There is 2 products for English version. One is coded by UTF8 and the
> other is coded by NON-UTF8. Both products are internationalized
> readiness. Let's say. The test engineer ensures the functionality
> and validates the input and output on major Latin 1 languages, such as
> German, French, Spanish, Italian, as well as Korean, Japanese,
> Chinese.
>
> If those products handle all languages as addressed above, could it be
> assumed that the entire character sets in whole latin 1, Han,
> Cyrillic, Arabic.... can be certifed on both products???
I guess it depends on what you mean by "certifying" a character set, and
what it means for a software product to be "internationalized
readiness."
There might be a character set that supports Latin-1 and CJK characters,
but not Cyrillic or Arabic characters. Quite a few character sets like
this were designed in Asia during the '80s. Rick mentioned the
additional problem with Arabic (and Hebrew) directionality, which is
certainly not trivial; many rendering engines can still only handle LTR.
Basically, the question seems to be whether software can be considered
"fully internationalized" or "world-ready" or what-have-you without
using UTF-8. And the answer is, of course it can. (Just use UTF-16. ☺)
Seriously, it is possible to create a certifiably internationalized
program without using Unicode... but why? You will not find another
single character set that covers all the blocks you mentioned (except
GB18030, which is really Unicode with different code points), so you
will have to go back to the ISO 2022 method of switching between
character sets. And you will have to convert to and from Unicode anyway
to interchange data with the rest of the world.
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
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