On Thu, 8 Feb 2001, Michael Everson wrote:
> At 04:48 -0800 2001-02-08, J M Sykes quoted the FT:
>
> >The International Standards Organisation (ISO) has now agreed to give
> >standard meanings to these remaining codes.
>
> Which as everyone knows, is really the International Organization for
> Standardization (ISO).
>
> Sigh.
> --
> Michael Everson ** Everson Gunn Teoranta ** http://www.egt.ie
> 15 Port Chaeimhghein Íochtarach; Baile Átha Cliath 2; Éire/Ireland
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>
Thursday, February 8, 2001
And the next sentence: "The new standard is known as 'Latin-1' or
'extended ASCII' and includes accented characters." I'd say 'includes
*some* accented characters' just as Latin-2, Latin-3 etc. include other
repertoires of accented characters and other alphabets needed for a
particular group. And later: "Double-byte codes are a very efficient
means of storing ideographic characters, such as Chinese, since a whole
word is stored in the equivalent of the space for two letters. Since each
word has a unique code there is also less of the ambiguity that is
inherent in, for example English ... Unicode's unambiguous meanings
..." This begs for a definition of a Chinese word and seems unaware that
Unicode assigns codes to characters, not to words or their meanings. Later
he accurately enough describes one approach to the character input issue
and then leaps to the domain names issue. I was unable to find
www.worldnames.com which he cites. I join Michael with a sigh. Feel free
to use these thoughts as part of a response, please do not forward this to
him or the Financial Times.
Regards,
Jim Agenbroad ( jage@LOC.gov )
The above are purely personal opinions, not necessarily the official
views of any government or any agency of any.
Phone: 202 707-9612; Fax: 202 707-0955; US mail: I.T.S. Dev.Gp.4, Library
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