A 02:43 99-06-08 -0700, Markus Kuhn a écrit :
>But as people start using UTF-8 now, supporting the more recent ISO 8859
>political correctness extensions will just add user confusion. More
>options -> more confusion. Make your users happy by *not* supporting all
>the latest ISO 8859 hacks and instead encourage your users to settle on
>Unicode and UTF-8. A broad migration from ISO 8859-1 to ISO 8859-15 is
>*NOT* what will help us in eventually migrating to ISO 10646, and should
>therefore not be encouraged in any way. If you have to support ISO
>8859-15 for any regulatory reasons, please sabotage it as well as you
>can, just like the X Consortium did so nicely in X11R6.4.
[Alain] I disagree. As well as I am a preacher for the UCS and Unicode in
all directions on this planet, the fixes that led to ISO/IEC 8859-15 are
*not* (from my point of view and from the point of view of many) due to
political correctness (unless you only think about the EURO SIGN and even
there, it is discussable). We came to that table to avoid changing Latin 1
itself, and do things correctly, any change in a standard table without
renaming it being a bad thing "à la Orwell's 1984".
Latin 1 does not support integral French nor Finnish and the result is that
one couldn't exchange in the 8-bit character set world, for example, French
characters <oe>, <OE> and <Y:> (œ, Œ and Ÿ under Windows 3, 95, 98), in a
standard way (the same applies to Finnish for 4 other chaarcters).
Windows-8 bit-c.s. uses the C1 zone for this. This creates a great
confusion between Windows and Mac exchanges, in particular also because the
Windows 1252 character set is most often identified as being Latin 1 (but
even if well identified, C1 is not safe in all environments, in particular
on EBCDIC systems which... still exist, it's a fact of life!)
Latin 15 would allow exchanging this in a correct way without disturbing
what is under the hood, say in Windows or on a Mac, or on mainframe
systems... and the exchanges would be OK for the 8 characters of latin 9
that differ in coding from latin 1.
I am surprised, markus, that you are in favour of standards and against
this fix that would alow harmonious back and forth trips between
UCS/Unicode to the 8-bit world for French/Finnish... and for teh EURO SIGN.
Personally, when I worked on this, and when French and Finnish people alos
worked on it, we did not do it for political correctness (if you knew me
you would know that I could not care less about that neo-Puritanism).
Companies did it to follow pressures from the EC about the EURO SIGN, but
we did it for fixing a flaw in the 8-bit character set world, a necessary
fix unless we all scrap 8-bit characrer sets for French and Finnish people
forever, and unfortunately that ain't gonna happen soon. This latter fact
accepted, we should all work so that UCS/Unicode be implemented as widely
as possible, but one shopuld not hide one's head in the sand for this, this
is also a religious attitude that leads to fanatic wars uselessly.
Alain laBonté
Québec
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