> > In any case, I'd recommend you drop the value-laden term, "legacy",
> > in favor of something more neutral and respectful, like "traditional",
> > "original", or whatever. Remember, today's hot stuff is tomorrow's
> > trash, and whatever we do today will soon be held in as much contempt
> > as we have now for all that preceded Unicode.
>
> I'm surprised you find the term so value-laden; I guess where I sit
> "legacy" is commonly used to mean "the thing we're now trying to
> replace." It denotes the previous successful standard whose value you
> are trying to preserve in the new system.
>
In the popular press, "legacy" means "not Windows". The longer version is:
"I am ashamed to admit I still have this old OS/computer/whatever but it's
only because it is running some important applications that have not yet
been upgraded to run on Windows, but really, I can't wait to throw the old
thing out and I can't believe I was so stupid to have it in the first place."
I think it is unfortunate that Unicode people use this term. Old standards
are not foolish -- we used them for many years, and most of them were
extremely well thought out, within their limitations, and furthermore, were
the result of honest efforts among competing parties to arrive at solutions
they could all live with -- something that rarely happens any more outside
of Unicode. But really, in common parlance, "legacy" means foolish. Pick
up any trade paper to see this.
- Frank
-
Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
