Re: NNBSP

[Asmus Freytag via Unicode]

On 1/18/2019 7:27 AM, Marcel Schneider via Unicode wrote: ....I understand only better why a significant majority of UTC is hating French. Francophobia is also palpable in Canada, beyond any technical reasons, especially in the IT industry. Hence the position of UTC is far from isolated. If ethic and personal considerations inflect decision-making, they should consistently be an integral part of discussions here. In that vein, I’d mention that by the time when Unicode was developed, there was a global hatred against France, that originated in French colonial and foreign politics since WWII, and was revived a few years ago by the French government sinking 𝑅𝑎𝑖𝑛𝑏𝑜𝑤 𝑊𝑎𝑟𝑟𝑖𝑜𝑟 and killing the crew’s photographer, in the port of Auckland. That crime triggered a peak of anger. Again, my recollections do not support any issues of Francophobia. The Unicode Technical committee has always had French people on board, from the beginning, and I have witnessed no issues where they took up a different technical position based on language. Quite the opposite, the UTC generally appreciates when someone can provide native insights into the requirements for supporting a given language. How best to realize these requirements then becomes a joint effort. If anything, the Unicode Consortium saw itself from the beginning in contrast to an IT culture for which internationalization at times was still something of an afterthought. Given all that, I find your suggestions and  implications deeply hurtful and hope you will find a way to avoid a repetition in the future. May I suggest that trying to rake over the past and apportion blame is generally less productive than moving forward and addressing the outstanding problems. A./