From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Thu Feb 07 2008 - 07:08:45 CST
Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
> The allocation has the rather practical implication that each Georgian
> letter requires three octets in the UTF-8 encoding, as opposite to two
> octets (for characters allocated in the range U+0080..U+07FF).
Is that really important for use on the Internet?
May be there are implications for things like SMS on basic mobile phones,
but I don't see why you should be restricted, to use, in Georgia, only ASCII
or UTF-8. Nothing prevents in fact a Georgian mobile phone operator to team
with mobile phone manufacturers in order to support an 8-bit encoding that
would become a defacto standard, recognized and accepted in Georgia in
addition to the Cyrillic script.
This won't reduce the possibility of maintaining interoperability with
Unicode, provided that at the same time a precise mapping of codes is
published. Choose your encoding as you want, what is important is not much
the codes where Georgian letters were allocated (and later extended), but
what users will want in their SMS, where the effective encoding usd on the
network does not matter much (given that they will use it directly on their
mobile phone, without having to convert it to other encodings for use in
their computer).
And they will also be able to send the same SMS using UTF-8 from any PC to
any Georgian mobile phone user: it's up to the operator to provide the
gateway featuring the code converter, and already up to him to accept
several other encoding schemes for Unicode and Georgian from their users
using web browsers to use their web mail interface to send/receive SMS
messages as they want.
I don't believe there's a need to implicate the Unicode consortium or ISO to
create such dedicated encoding schemes if it is really desired and justified
by cost or technical limitations (such as the maximum size of SMS messages).
Really the main question is not the encoding itself but if there exists a
market for messaging in Georgian on the mobile phone, and what is required
to get mobile phones at the same prices as existing ones and featuring the
support for Georgian script(s). [Note the optional plural: I'm note sure you
need support for all Georgian scripts on mobile phones].
Anyway, it will be really technically simpler to support Georgian than many
of the Indian scripts that still don't have good support in India, despite
of the existence of ISCII (poor or wrong rendering of grapheme clusters, and
more difficulties to compose messages correctly on a 10-digits keyboard).
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