2012-11-10 21:52, Erkki I Kolehmainen wrote:
FYI: After a very long process the European Commission has rejected the
standardization project for “Core Character repertoire” (that was also
presented at IUC 34) with the following rationale:
“As the Unicode standard includes all the standard characters needed in
all official EU languages as well as almost all characters needed in
most of the world’s writing systems, it is difficult to see what
benefits there would be in implementing a specialisation of Unicode only
for EU languages.
This is very regrettable. Not very unexpected, given the widespread
misunderstanding of what Unicode is and what it is not.
“In addition, the problems described in the proposal are related to
non-implementation of this standard, and a new one would not change
these problems.
Now, *that* is a somewhat unexpected misunderstanding.
It would appear from the above that the Commission is regrettably
unaware of the difference between encoding and character repertoire
issues and the extensive work needed to be done with confusables and
other security aspects of Unicode as well as of the need for guidance on
the fallback mechanisms required in several instances.
I would be mostly worried about the failure to understand that support
to Unicode does not imply support to any specific character repertoire,
such as the repertoire needed to write official EU languages (or
languages for which support is needed in a particular context).
Unfortunately,
since the said “specialisation” is ultimately required for the
implementation of public registers in each country for both their own
use and also for the much needed interoperability between EU member
states, they’ll have to do it on their own without the benefits of a
joint standardization effort.
I think what we can learn from this sad incident is that there should be
less emphasis on the idea that Unicode solves character problems and
more emphasis on the idea that Unicode just defines a framework for
addressing such problems.
I’m afraid most people who think they know Unicode don’t even realize
that no single font covers all of Unicode, or could possible cover at
the current state of the art, and that conformance to the standard does
not require that all characters be processed according to their defined
semantics.
Yucca
