Re: Plane 14 language tags

From: Richard Gillam (rgillam@jtcsv.com)
Date: Wed Jan 19 2000 - 14:09:03 EST


Christopher John Fynn wrote:
>
> One reason it might be a good idea to encourage the use of plane 14 language
> tags rather than tagging schemes outside Unicode is that once you have
> external tags it becomes almost as easy to support a set of separate
> encoding standards for individual languages as it is to support Unicode.

Why?

What applications might need to support are different interchange formats for
*rich text*, but they'd all still use the same character encoding. The problem
of interchanging styled text has always been a problem, and it's not a problem
Unicde was ever intended to solve. I think, however, that there are XML-based
standards that *are* intended to serve as a common interchange format for styled
text.

The Plane 14 tag characters in my mind were designed to solve the same problems
that XML and HTML were designed to solve. The Plane 14 tag characters are a
pain in the butt for most text processes to deal with-- encoding them as special
"plain text" characters just obscures the fact that a document that uses them is
using a markup language that has to be parsed out. With existing markup
languages, there's no question that the markup has to be parsed out of the plain
text to properly process the plain text.

--Rich Gillam
  Unicode Technology geek
  IBM



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