Mind you, well over ten years ago there was an EU funded project in CEN/TC304, 
European Localization Requirements, to specify such fallbacks for use in 
Europe. In spite of the fact that there was conceivably more need to 
accommodate antiquated systems, the project had to be terminated because no 
reasonable consensus could be reached.   

Sincerely, Erkki I. Kolehmainen

-----Alkuperäinen viesti-----
Lähettäjä: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] 
Puolesta Jukka K. Korpela
Lähetetty: 4. marraskuuta 2013 21:53
Vastaanottaja: [email protected]
Aihe: Re: How to remove accents while conforming to language standards?

2013-11-04 21:00, Jennifer Wong wrote:

> The use case is that customers want to integrate data from our
> enterprise solution to their ASCII-based downstream systems.

This is very different from the question about removing accents while 
conforming to language standards. The very goal makes it impossible to 
conform to language standards. The next question should be what the data 
will be used for, and how.

> Thus all accents need to be removed.

I would not jump into that conclusion. Just because some system is 
ASCII-based does not mean that you cannot in any way handle non-ASCII 
data. You can encode non-ASCII characters in ASCII in many ways. To take 
a trivial example, you could convert È to E` and later possibly convert 
it back, though in such approaches you need to be careful to make the 
conversion reversible (if it needs to be). In some cases, out-of-band 
information could be included, e.g. entering a name in a simplified form 
in ASCII but accompanied with a note (in ASCII) describing accents that 
have been omitted.

Even if it is acceptable to do lossy mappings (like just dropping all 
accents, or mapping, say, Ä to AE without worrying about possible AE in 
original data), the crucial question is how the data will be used, now 
and in the future.

Yucca





Reply via email to