This message apparently did not reach the list, so I'm sending it again.
At 8:30 AM -0500 4/13/01, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>There are *always* other code pages. There are several for Inuktitut, for
>example. The problem is that they are generally proprietary to small groups
>of users or particular products, and what lacks is a standard. Unicode
>provides a solution to what has been an **incredible** mess for a lot of
>writing systems. That's a **huge** benefit.
I would like to point out, again, that there is not now, and cannot
be, an 8-bit code page adequate to English, and the same is
necessarily true for every other language in modern use. More than a
century of typewriters and computers has inured us to the hardship of
less than publication- and calligraphic-quality documents, but has
only slightly changed the standards for publication itself.
One of the strongest benefits of Unicode is that it supports adequate
*monolingual* computing for the first time in any language.
>Others in this category -- no widely accepted standard other than Unicode,
>but lots of non-standard code pages in use -- probably include Ethiopic,
>Burmese, Lao, Syriac, Old Italic, Gothic, Deseret, Runic, Ogham, IPA
>(definitely), Thaana, Tibetan, Cherokee, polytonic Greek, and Math.
Add APL to that list. No two venders have ever agreed on the
repertoire or encoding. The closest we ever came was the 7-bit ASCII
encoding used in the Workspace Interchange Standard (WSIS). However,
it relied on an explicit overstriking mechanism, and did not define a
set of accepted overstrike combinations.
Also add a large number of languages not adequately served by
existing code pages for their writing systems.
Roozbeh has been telling us about the problems for Farsi (which I
assume would include Dari), and I would expect many other languages
currently or formerly written in Arabic script (Azeri, Pashto, Urdu,
prerevolutionary Turkish, Swahili, Malay-Indonesion, etc.) to have
similar problems.
I know for sure that this is a problem for Yiddish in Hebrew script,
and I would be surprised if it didn't apply to Ladino, Judeo-Arabic,
and other Jewish languages.
I believe that we have had examples in extended Cyrillic. Was it
Kurdish? Serbian? What about all of the minority languages of the
former Soviet Union? There were 235 of them written in Cyrillic,
according to something I read, but I don't know that anyone had an
accurate count.
Hong Kong Chinese does not have a stable standard at all yet.
There must be quite a number of languages written in various
extensions of the Latin alphabet that don't have suitable code pages.
I don't know the situation with Indic scripts that are used for more
than one language.
What about Yi? Sinhala?
What about Pali written in any of Sinhala, Thai, Burmese, Devanagari,
and extended Latin scripts? I know that there is a problem for
Sanskrit written in Tibetan and other Asian scripts.
Have I left anything out? I would expect so, certainly.
--
Edward Cherlin
Generalist
"A knot!" exclaimed Alice. "Oh, do let me help to undo it."
Alice in Wonderland
--
Edward Cherlin
Generalist
"A knot!" exclaimed Alice. "Oh, do let me help to undo it."
Alice in Wonderland
