>If you are concerned about the digital divide, then Unicode on the
>web, and all that distributed processing and informational power in
>those consumer PC's loaded up with Unicode-handling software for a
>pittance, are your *friends* in the struggle to keep all economic
>power from concentration in the top 0.01% of the world's hands.
Very true! In particular Unicode has great potential for empowering
marginalized groups, whose native language/script was perhaps only
accessible via various mutually incompatible font kludges (or .gif's on the
web) in the pre-Unicode computer world. The value of being able to
communicate/publish in a standard manner in any language far outweighs the
possible problems faced by someone with old equipment/software trying to
produce antique ligatures. And the cost, as Ken points out, is hardly an
overwhelming obstacle: Apple is also currently selling refurb iMac's with
fully Unicode capable OS X for $610.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri May 31 2002 - 17:15:41 EDT