Re: Multilingual Documents [was: HTML forms and UTF-8]

From: Michael Everson (everson@indigo.ie)
Date: Thu Dec 02 1999 - 10:16:03 EST


Ar 18:18 -0800 1999-12-01, scríobh A. Vine:

>The bottom line was then and is now, how much are folks willing to pay for
>multilingual capability, and how many folks are willing to pay it? Software
>companies are for-profit organizations. Multilingual support is not trivial.
>It costs a tremendous amount of money to garner the expertise, evaluate the
>product(s), design, and code, for multilingual.

Well, Andrea, it depends _how_ multilingual. In Unicode terms, if it has to
do with representing many complex scripts, that costs lots in terms of
rendering. But what I don't want to see is a limitation of character
repertoire, say, in the Latin script.

What Asmus said is an example of the problem:

>> 4) Most of my (European) newspapers easily cross alphabet boundaries
>> (e.g. use of correct Latin-2 accents is common in Latin-1 languages).

This is 8-bit limited-character-set thinking, and it worries me, because if
we go dipping down to the bottom line of "Latin letters people pay for"
then the users of less economically powerful languages will be left out in
the cold. As they have been for far too long.

Michael Everson * Everson Gunn Teoranta * http://www.indigo.ie/egt
15 Port Chaeimhghein Íochtarach; Baile Átha Cliath 2; Éire/Ireland
Vox +353 1 478 2597 ** Fax +353 1 478 2597 ** Mob +353 86 807 9169
27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn; Baile an Bhóthair; Co. Átha Cliath; Éire



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