Dear Ed,
Thank you for your lovely long and private e-mail, which I shall not quote on the list, only referring to its usefulness in prompting me to write this msg to the list, in supplement to my rather blunt note of yesterday. EGT was one of the first companies to give (almost) unqualified support to the setting up of Unicode. Subscribers to list 10646@ will recall that fact (at that time, I was already interested in 10646, and was attending conferences alone, at which I tried to convince others involved in standards/implementations that 8859-1 was not enough to satisfy the immediate and urgent community and commercial needs of my own company). A those conferences, I found myself among people whose �vision�, if you could call it that, was just about limited to persuading everyone, everywhere to �stick to ASCII�. When it became clear that 10646 was getting unwieldy, EGT took a 2-pronged approach, consisting of establishing new Irish National Standards and adding to the 8859- series, which proved a lot more productive than trusting to 10646 alone (both of which aims EGT successfully achieved). The immediate attraction ang great advantage of Unicode�s vision was its simplicity/focus: after an unsteady and argumentative start, its founders committed Unicode to the IMPLEMENTATION of10646, and became very specific (loud) about not calling it a STANDARD (note to newcomers - check out the archives of the relevant lists). We could all see that there was little chance that 10646 could succeed without big business behind it, and without addressing (which WG2 alone could not do) techreport/implementational aspects of 10646, which became the responsibility of Unicode (which made us all very happy). I, for one, am still a believer in the vision of Unicode, and still monitor/support its mailing list/other activities, and hope to live long enough to see it succeed, although I have to admit to getting so very many things wrong about Unicode in the past: I saw it as another ECMA, only less institutional (wrong), I thought, for example, that involvement in it would cost EGT very little, in terms of working hours (wrong) and in terms of money (wrong), and I expected the ad hoc Uncode consortium itself to voluntarily disband in 3-5 years (wrong again) having successfully fulfilled its brief of producing implementations of 10646 with flying colours (again wrong, as it has yet to do that). When, after all the years of receiving Irish support, I saw Unicode�s 2002 conference in Dublin being advertised as more of a showcase for German than native interests, I decided not to attend, but that does not mean any withdrawal of EGT�s initial and longstanding support of Unicode, in principal (although it seems to have produced only one thing to date, viz., a book called �The Unicode Standard� (where I expected to read �Implementation�). While I regret the actual perentage of time/money invested by my company in Unicode over the years, I have no regrets at all as to our decision to support Unicode, as an implementation of 10646, and I still expect to see its benefits, in terms of platform-independent, no-cost applications accrue to EGT and others at community level, in whichever local communities survive to witness that. mg cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] 2002-07-18 -- Marion Gunn * E G T (Estab.1991) vox: +353-1-2839396 * [EMAIL PROTECTED] 27 P�irc an Fh�ithlinn; Baile an Bh�thair; Contae �tha Cliath; �ire
