From: Patrick Andries (patrick.andries@xcential.com)
Date: Thu Apr 21 2005 - 11:30:24 CST
Doug Ewell a écrit :
>If the move is on to encourage software vendors to develop their own
>proprietary lists of "accurate" character names for character-map UIs
>and such, instead of using the official, non-perfect Unicode character
>names, it might be well to remember these two pitfalls that seem to
>resurface whenever someone attempts such a project:
>
>1. Character names that express meaning or purpose are not universal.
>
>By renaming U WITH DIAERESIS to U WITH UMLAUT, trying to make the
>character name more appropriate for German usage, the name has just
>become *less* appropriate for usage in Spanish and other languages,
>where the two dots indicate a diaeresis function rather than an umlaut
>function.
>
Which only militates in favour of localized names, but each vendors
having their own proprietary localized or not list of names is not only
a waste of money (each develops the same thing) but is rather
conterproductive : there is some value to standardizing uniques names
(people using the same name will know they refer to the same thing and
once you get the knack of the naming system used you can more easily
predict names and find the corresponding characters through some UI).
Now, I also support the possibility of searching names by their aliases
and with multi-criteria expressions or language-specific
attributes...(Babelmap in French has, for instance, a switch that will
ignore accents or not when searching for a character name). But this is
certainly not the work of any standardization body, this is where
vendors would be able to distinguish themselves.
So, in my opinion, localized standardized names. This is why Canada,
Québec and France (and I mean not only people(*) but also actual
government money) have supported the official French ISO 10646 names (as
well as the publishing of the whole 10646 standard in French).
P.A.
(*) We have actually got much help from people in other countries to
come up with good French names: Switzerland, Belgium, Ireland, Morocco,
the USA, the UK, etc. A big thank you.
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