From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Fri Apr 01 2005 - 17:15:34 CST
Mountain View, CA, April 1, 2005 - The Unicode(R) Consortium announced
today that due to irreconcilable technical problems, the Unicode
Standard has been withdrawn. All Unicode characters are now
considered deprecated, until such time as further study and input
can rectify any mistakes in the standard.
"We have received numerous complaints about the Unicode Standard
insulting minority languages," said Mark Davis, President of the
Unicode Consortium. "It is clear that we have inadvertantly
published misleading and mistaken character names in our
standard. We consider this situation intolerable, and had no
choice but to shut down the enterprise until corrective actions
could be taken."
The Unicode Consortium apologizes to developers around the world
for any inconvenience caused by withdrawal of the standard, and hopes
that alternative solutions can be found on a speedy basis.
The Unicode office will be happy to refer inquiries about
code page and character support to major software vendors, who can be
expected to take up the slack in the absence of the Unicode
Standard.
About the Unicode Standard
The Unicode Standard used to be a fundamental component of
all modern software and information technology protocols.
It provided a uniform, universal architecture, and managed
to equally insult all languages of the world. It had over
96,000 characters encoded, many of them mistakenly. It was
the basis for mis-processing, data loss and misbehavior of
browsers worldwide. It led to an epidemic of undisplayable
character boxes. Unicode was regularly lambasted by
developers of modern protocols such as IDN and has been
blamed for security problems on the Internet because it
encoded more than 94 characters -- some of which happened
to look like each other.
About the Unicode Consortium
The Unicode Consortium was a non-profit organization founded
to develop, extend and promote software globalization. Because
withdrawal of the Unicode Standard has pretty much left it
without a mission and the officers with nothing to do, the
Unicode website has been repurposed to take advantage of
online gambling, so we can finally make a profit.
For more information, please sign up for Internet poker
at http://www.unicode.org/FourOne.html
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