Radovan Garabik wrote: > Google is your friend :-) > "i18n" is first mentioned in USENET on 30 nov 1989,
Cute, I didn't imagine Google archives went all that way back! BTW, the first mention of Unicode on Usenet predates it by eight days: Subject: Re: ASCII for national characters Newsgroups: comp.std.internat From: Donn Terry Date: 1989-11-22 10:43:42 PST (http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=9300002%40hpfcdc.HP.COM) | [...] | UNICODE: this isn't a standard but is proposed. Unifies the Han | character sets in the same way as the Latin ones (but with | obviously a much bigger payback because of the size). Fixed | length 16 bits. This fixes the length in characters vs. length | in bytes issue. (The issue of length in display space is | inherently harder because characters do vary in width in natural | usage in many phonetic alphabets, as well as in the ideographic | ones. See Arabic and Hindi where the constant-width usage is | considered "pretty awful", albeit readable. (Even in English, | good typesetting is not constant width.)) | [...] The same message also says something about a competing standard: | [...] | ISO10646: 32-bit everything code. Treats the various Han character sets | as distinct character sets for each national usage, but unifies the | Latin characters into a single set. Variable length coding possible | to reduce space. Can degenerate to (something close to) 8859. | [...] _ Marco
