> On Tue, Jun 12, 2001 at 12:29:51PM -0400, Raul Miller wrote: > > I disagree with the idea that special symbols may only be used in > > certain contexts. That's like saying that HTML should only be used > > to describe the structure of a document and not its appearance --
On Tue, Jun 12, 2001 at 01:52:44PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote: > Which is exactly correct. It does not appear that Raul is willing to > discuss this issue rationally, therefore I will content myself with > opposing his position. If this were true, we wouldn't have emerging standards such as XHTML to rectify the problem. > Hopefully the rest of the technical committee has greater respect for > thoughtfully-scoped, coherent and directed standards, and not phenomena > like Visual Basic, which was famously derided as being a language designed > by "focus group". This isn't a technical committee issue, nor is it about visual basic. At least, not currently. However, I am sorry for allowing this to devolve into a discussion of tangential points. * * * * * It was just pointed out to me by a Unicode guy, that XML has an xml:lang attribute which can be used on any xml tag. If we structure our handling of multi-language documents based on this aspect of XML (and use unicode tr27 to support this same functionality in non-XML documents) we can address the "unicode doesn't have a way of specifying the language" issue. But that still leaves us with the "JIS has characters which aren't in Unicode" issue. [If that's an actual issue.] -- Raul