From: Donald Z. Osborn (dzo@bisharat.net)
Date: Fri Apr 01 2005 - 17:39:44 CST
I was just remarking on another list that it was too bad there is not French
(and by extension other major language) translation of announcements from the
Consortium. How are non-English speakers to know that there's no Unicode
anymore? Some don't know about Version 4.1 - or the whole enterprise - and now
this on top of everything else!
DZO
Quoting Kenneth Whistler <kenw@sybase.com>:
> 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 Standard has been withdrawn.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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