Re: Unicode progress

[Masataka Ohta <[e-mail]>]

> Dan:
>   It certainly sounds like some major industry players are backing this, and
> it sounds like they might have the muscle to mandate this. One concern I have
> is that we have some practical experience with this before it gets widely
> deployed... Could you send me (or even better, post to the WNILS list) the
> papers for the Plan 9 use of Unicode? In addition, I seem to remember some
> problems with Japanese / Chinese arguments over characters that look the same
> but needed to have different encodings for political reasons...

That problem of Unicode is technical, not political.

Just as characters in Greek and English are different, characters in
Japanese and Chinese are different and should be assigned different
code points, if we need to use Unicode without furthur specification.

Instead, if you must support the both specification:

	unicode-japanese

and

	unicode-chinese

it is not so useful because you can't assume a single default. If we
can allow for further profiling information, there is no reason not to
allow all the registered charsets of MIME.

> Has that been settled?

It depends.

It seems to me, now, that many people who contributed to Unicode thinks
Unicode should be used with further profiling information such as

	unicode-with-ascii-characters-only

	unicode-with-english-and-french-characters-only

and then, 

	unicode-japanese

	unicode-chinese

will also be naturally supported.

But then, I can, by no means, say Unicode "Universal".

Again, if we can allow for further profiling information, there is no reason
not to allow all the registered charsets of MIME.

Thus, IMHO, the issue is settled in a sense which makes the adaption of
*THE SINGLE* character set: Unicode quite inappropriate.

> In addition, this is a problem we're facing in a lot of places; in
> the URN discussions, the data element discussions, etc.

Unless you think WNILS needs its own further discussion on character
encoding, please direct the discussion to other mailing lists or
directly to me (Reply-To is set so).

							Masataka Ohta

PS

It should be noted that whois service in Japan by JPNIC is using
ISO-2022-JP encoding of RFC1468.