Re: Perception that Unicode is 16-bit (was: Re: Surrogate space in Unicode)

From: Tex Texin (texin@progress.com)
Date: Mon Feb 19 2001 - 23:28:31 EST


Guys,
Can we put this thread on a constructive footing? I am sure there is
lots of outdated and/or incorrect information out there and I would
like to preempt its being identified via numerous emails here.
If the belief is there
are misperceptions that need to be corrected, how should the
problem be addressed? Bear in mind the volunteer nature of the
organization....

It seems to me the Unicode web site has gone thru a number of changes
recently to provide information more clearly and directly. That was
a good start.

It perhaps would be good if those of you that understand Unicode
well, and participate in developer conferences (Java, XML, etc.)
would propose and deliver talks on using Unicode in those environments,
and help spread the word.

Perhaps creating a conformance test suite would help people understand
the requirements...

Or minimally a checklist that developers can use to self-evaluate their
Unicode compliance would help.

Maybe a checklist for authors would be good too. A list of misstatements
to avoid...

Other ideas?
tex
David Starner wrote:
>
> On Mon, Feb 19, 2001 at 05:42:41PM -0800, DougEwell2@cs.com wrote:
> > A few days ago I said there was a "widespread belief" that Unicode is a
> > 16-bit-only character set that ends at U+FFFF. A corollary is that the
> > supplementary characters ranging from U+10000 to U+10FFFF are either
> > little-known or perceived to belong to ISO/IEC 10646 only, not to Unicode.
> >
> > At least one list member questioned whether this belief was really widespread.
>
> Or, for another example, from the Berlin (GUI project) news
> (http://www.berlin-consortium.org/news.html#2001-01-10):
>
> With the Unicode-related functions in Prague growing out of size, I moved them
> into a new library called 'Babylon'. It will provide all the functionality
> defined in the Unicode standard (it is not Unicode but ISO 10646 compliant as
> it uses 32bit wide characters internally) and is written in C++.
>
> --
> David Starner - dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org
> Pointless website: http://dvdeug.dhis.org
> "I don't care if Bill personally has my name and reads my email and
> laughs at me. In fact, I'd be rather honored." - Joseph_Greg

-- 
According to Murphy, nothing goes according to Hoyle.
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