Michka, > The fact > that there is no member companhy that fully implements all of Unicode has go > to be staicking in more craws that just mine.
Ulp. Craw-staicking must be painful. ;-) But I think people may need to come to the realization that Unicode may have exceeded the point where we can expect any member company, or any other company for that matter, to implement *all* of Unicode. Think what that means. The Unicode Standard is the *universal* character encoding. It is intentionally scoped to deal with all characters for all scripts, living and extinct. Getting software to cope with *all* writing systems, including long dead ones, is a pretty tall order. And the encoding is gigantic and getter larger. But Unicode conformance is pitched to allow people to bite off usable chunks of the standard, without having to deal with all of it for their chunk to be useful. It is certainly conceivable that someone would want to deal with just Mongolian, Cyrillic, and Latin in an application, for example, and not be bothered with Cuneiform at the same time. In terms of font support and rendering, in fact, we encourage people to think in terms of specializing on particular scripts. You get better results that way, when you focus in on the details of support for a script, rather than trying to provide overly broad but incomplete support. I realize that the OS platform vendors are in a special case here, since they provide the underlying support that other applications must make use of. So the platforms, as well as crucial libraries and protocols, must keep their support as broad as possible. But I think we also need to be visibly and volubly supporting specialists who deal just with the bits and pieces of Unicode that they need for particular applications. --Ken
