Well, I can't argue when people tell me that three companies
did reasonably extensive research and found the same results.
But that's definitely a different argument than what was
originally presented: "Multilingual documents are rare,
therefore people must not want them." There was a logical
fallicy there I wanted to point out, but Chris, Joe and Tex
have provided evidence that supports the conclusion.
I wonder if the research done included web documents, which
was, after all, what started this discussion: difficulties in
creating multilingual web documents. I can easily imagine
*lots* of potential need for multilingual web documents, and
others have suggested the need. For example, I find it not
uncommon to perform a web search, searching on a monolingual
English string, and to get result pages with multilingual - and
multiscript - content. I've come to expect that the portion in
another script will be illegible gibberish (though IE 5 is
definitely a move in the right direction). I think it's a valid
conclusion - and, if I recall, this was the original point of
this aspect of this thread - that there is a real market need
to improve Netscape Navigator's ability to deal with
multilingual documents (and forms).
There are also the minority who have a need for multilingual
(web and traditional) documents, who are part of the
developers' market. We may not represent enough of the revenue
to sway any business model, but we still hope technology will
advance to provide the capabilities we'd like to have. Whether
that comes through explicit design or as a side benefit of a
program of software globalisation doesn't really matter, as
long as the desired capabilities arrive.
Peter
From: <texin@progress.com> AT Internet on 11/22/99 04:16 PM CST
Received on: 11/22/99
To: Peter Constable/IntlAdmin/WCT, <unicode@unicode.org> AT
Internet@Ccmail
cc:
Subject: Re: Multilingual Documents [was: HTML forms and
UTF-8]
I would like to echo Chris and Joe's remarks,
Progress also found that a very significant majority of the
market
needs only monolingual documents. However Unicode-provided
worldwide access and simplified deployment are appreciated.
--
Progress Software: The #1 Embedded Database
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Tex Texin Director, International Products
Progress Software Corp. Voice: +1-781-280-4271
14 Oak Park Fax: +1-781-280-4949
Bedford, MA 01730 USA texin@bedford.progress.com
http://www.progress.com http://apptivity.progress.com
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