From: Michael S. Kaplan (michka@trigeminal.com)
Date: Thu Feb 07 2008 - 05:22:27 CST
From: "Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven" <asmodai@in-nomine.org>
> Sorry Michael, but to me this makes no sense logically.
Having flown halfway around the world to talk to people who for whatever
reasons, both valid and invalid (and not really distinguishing which is
which on their list of concerns), are unhappy with a language encoding that
in their view doubles or worse the amount of bytes used to store their
language in Unicode, I can tell you that this as very real concern on some
people's minds.
True or false, it is on their minds. They can all add and multiply, and it
certainly looks like a 2x or 3x situation to them.
And we get a lot further by acknowledging their concerns and then showing
them that they have less to be concerned about than they think, in the end,
then we ever would by telling them there are wrong, wrong, wrong.
And since one of the additional concerns they have expressed is that had
their script been encoded differently, they'd need fewer bytes, AND give
them the encoding they wanted anyway,once again dismissing their desire to
understand the history is dismissing THEM and that is not the way to have a
conversation -- that is the way to lecture.
Believe me, I know -- I am doing it to you now. :-)
Now look, I do not agree with the arguments. But it does seem unfortunate
for the people in the one-byte and two-byte space who mostly like how their
scripts are encoded and have great hardware and broadband to be lecturing
the three-byte folk with older hardware and less infrastructure and less
broadband on how their worries are spurious and their desire for
understanding why is pointless.
TALKING to people, explaining, without that implicit "you idiot" tacked on
to each sentence gets people a lot further.
It makes much more sense to:
1) acknowledge their concerns
2) explain the history
3) show them how their concerns can be minimized, and why things are not as
bad as they seem
after which people are guaranteed to be (if not happier with the situation)
then at least less unhappy with it. And with us....
Anyway, that is all I am trying to say. Hopefully people will think before
they respond once they see they do not have to convince me of anything -- I
*know* it isn't a problem -- they just need to have a more constructive
approach to people who ask the questions. :-)
MichKa [MS]
Windows International
(though speaking just for me)
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