Unicode end-users

From: Graham Rhind (Grambo@compuserve.com)
Date: Fri Aug 01 1997 - 03:42:52 EDT


Thanks for the replies to my questions about how Unicode can be used by
end-users.

I would sum up as follows (please try to make a switch and look at least
questions from the point of view of a non-developer - this may all seem
obvious, but not to me, and after months of research, not to anybody else I
have spoken to either ...):

"Software is still limited by underlying ASCII code pages. Unicode can be
used internally by any software which supports it, but there is no way for
a user to type in a "code" standard for any program to specify a Unicode
which can then be recognized by other programs across hardware and software
platforms."

Is this really the case? Are there plans to enable Unicode to function as
ASCII does, for example, so that it is application independent and is of
direct use to the user rather than just to software developers? It is very
depressing for users such as myself in Europe that even after all these
years it is still impossible for us to take a database of names from two
neighbouring countries and merge them because database software assigns a
single code page to the tables and this cannot represent all the characters
needed.

Please tell me I'm wrong ......

Graham Rhind
Author, "Building and Maintaining a European Direct Marketing Database"



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:36 EDT