On 11/14/2011 7:30 AM, Naena Guru wrote:
Unicode was created for a commercial reason, particularly for the benefit of its directors.
This statement, not backed up by evidence, indicates a rather rudimentary understanding of the forces that were behind the creation of the universal character set. Coming as it does without details, it doesn't add much to the discussion.
I can understand that some people are frustrated, when, over two decades after the basic design was hashed out, the implementation is still not seamless.
The reason for that has to be sought in the inherent complexity of writing systems. Even apparently very simple writing systems can have surprising complexity when you try to support all areas of use and in high quality typography.
Unicode is not just a character set, it provides a common framework for organizing and formalizing much knowledge about writing systems. As a result, there is now far more information and more accessible information about writing systems than when Unicode was started. Had all this information been available 20 to 25 years ago, there's a fair chance that the design of a universal character set would have differed in some aspects from what we now know as Unicode.
But even with the benefit of such hindsight, the sheer complexity of writing systems remains. This complexity means that there will most likely never be any implementation that supports all writing systems to their fullest (highest quality). Every practical implementation will subset somewhere, and that means there's no guarantee that any two implementations will faithfully interoperate.
It might be that a different design would have made some implementations easier, but I strongly suspect that the limitations I described here are fundamental, so that the expectation would be that a different design would have merely made other tasks more difficult while making certain ones easier.
A./
