Well - in this case the description is aimed at an end user, for whom Unicode is an irritation rather than a benefit (since it makes him have to think for five seconds about character encodings from time to time - if only because it breaks compatibility with things like Windows 95 Notepad or Word 2.0). To say to him "we are causing you this inconvenience so that we can sell more software to Japan" will not make him grateful AT ALL.
Thus I'm not trying to exhort, or make a business case for using Unicode, I'm trying to seduce gently. End users, if they are librarians of a small charitable foundation somewhere in rural England, will have no real use for Unicode, and it seems much more honest to admit that at the beginning. If their bit of rural England happens to be near Wales, then there is a slight benefit; if they have to deal with Slavs, there is more... and so the seduction can begin.
At 04:47 07/08/02 -0400, Tex Texin wrote:
>Martin,
>But why bear down on how much of W.E. is supported by 1252? The more
>significant point is what is not supported-
>Japan (last I looked) was the second biggest software market in the
>world.
>China may be the biggest market in the next decade. (Yeah ok we said
>that last decade. ;-) )
>Inability for Western Europe to leverage Eastern European languages,
>inhibits utilization of nearby resources...
>
>To be sure the lack of Welsh or Maltese is a problem, but in the scale
>of things...
>
>I have already deleted the mails, but I came away with the impression
>that Catalan is fine, you just need to write l-middle dot-l, instead of
>with a single code point.
>
>For your introduction, you might also want to take a look at:
>http://www.i18nguy.com/UnicodeBenefits.html
>
>tex
>Martin Kochanski wrote:
>>
>> Writing a simple introduction to Unicode for ordinary users ("why are you giving me all those features I never asked for?"), I was about to concede that code page 1252 already covers the Western European languages. Then I realised that it doesn't, because neither Welsh nor Maltese can be properly expressed in 1252.
>>
>> For the sake of completeness, are there any other living Western European languages that need Unicode? From the recent correspondence, it seems that Catalan would not be on that list.
>>
>> - Martin Kochanski.
>
>--
>-------------------------------------------------------------
>Tex Texin cell: +1 781 789 1898 mailto:Tex@XenCraft.com
>Xen Master http://www.i18nGuy.com
>
>XenCraft http://www.XenCraft.com
>Making e-Business Work Around the World
>-------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Wed Aug 07 2002 - 04:22:25 EDT