Tomohiro KUBOTA wrote on 2001-04-07 02:21 UTC:
> 2. A mere technology such as Unicode must not rule our languages.
> When we have to learn exotic Ideographs such as ancient Chinese
> literature, we learn these characters since it is worth doing.
> It is a literature and a culture. On the other hand, learning
> characters in order to be compliant to Unicode is never worth
> doing. Unicode is mere a technology. Why must we be compliant
> to a technology? Technology must be compliant to our culture.
Han unification is far more than just a technological restriction
manifested in ISO 10646. It is the idea of a historically and
conceptually sound typographic reform that many CJK scholars have
proposed for a long time. The IRG has finally created -- after decades
of preparatory scholarly discussion -- a coded character set that
enables the implementation of this idea. UCS is now just another reason
to have a more serious look at an otherwise old and in itself perfectly
legitimate and technology-independent cultural idea.
UCS encourages and supports typographic Han unification, i.e. the
development of common font styles for users in all countries that use
Chinese ideographs. But UCS clearly does not mandate typographic Han
unification in any way. Legacy character set round-trip compatibility
was provided to guarantee exactly that. Anything else is technologically
unsubstantiated political waffle by a tiny number of Japanese fans of a
truly pathetic and obsolete font selection mechanism, namely ISO 2022.
There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to
conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in
the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has
for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions,
and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new.
-- Machiavelli, "The Prince"
Markus
--
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
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Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
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