Here is a comment on
At Wed, 20 Jun 2001 13:50:25 +0100,
Markus Kuhn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Comment on:
>
> Locale name guideline [Public Review Draft 2001-05-31]
> http://www.li18nux.org/docs/text/locale-name-20010531.txt
> I suggest the list of standardised encoding names to be limited to
> *exactly* the following 19 character encoding names:
I oppose to any idea to limit encodings to countable known set.
Reason:
1. It is clear that such a limitation does not benefits users.
2. Such a limitation does not benefits developers, because,
if there are any needs to implement encodings other than
Markus' 19 encodings, the developers will not be able to
refer standardized names for their encodings.
3. Listing names of encodings here does not mean requirement
for systems to implement these encodings. Thus, having many
names of encodings cannot be a load for developers.
4. We cannot foretell all needs now and in future of everyone
in the world. So, it is not a good idea to limit it to the
range of our imagination.
5. New encodings may be developed in future, like GB18030 and
EUC-JISX0213 are developed very recently.
6. Existence of "r"-series multibyte functions such as mbrtowc()
means that multibyte characters with state is legal. Thus,
no reason to exclude stateful encodings.
Markus says that
> Character encodings in categories d)-e) are today anyway practically not
> usable with most POSIX applications,
However, he ignores sincere development efforts to support.
(For example, read http://cook.anu.edu.au/linux/ and you can find an
effort to support TIS-620 on Linux.)
> Software that knows about bidirectionality,
> combining characters and ligature substitution today can really also be
> expected to know about UTF-8.
This opinion is based on Markus' limited knowledge. (I don't blame his
on not knowing everything in the world. It is natural. However, I cannot
help blaming him that he insists that things which he doesn't know do not
exist.)
---
Tomohiro KUBOTA <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/
"Introduction to I18N" http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/intro-i18n/
-
Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
