From: Marco Cimarosti (marco.cimarosti@essetre.it)
Date: Thu Oct 10 2002 - 12:35:18 EDT
Radovan Garabik wrote:
> Google is your friend :-)
> "i18n" is first mentioned in USENET on 30 nov 1989,
Cute, I didn't imagine Google archives went all that way back!
BTW, the first mention of Unicode on Usenet predates it by eight days:
Subject: Re: ASCII for national characters
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat
From: Donn Terry
Date: 1989-11-22 10:43:42 PST
(http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=9300002%40hpfcdc.HP.COM)
| [...]
| UNICODE: this isn't a standard but is proposed. Unifies the Han
| character sets in the same way as the Latin ones (but with
| obviously a much bigger payback because of the size). Fixed
| length 16 bits. This fixes the length in characters vs. length
| in bytes issue. (The issue of length in display space is
| inherently harder because characters do vary in width in natural
| usage in many phonetic alphabets, as well as in the ideographic
| ones. See Arabic and Hindi where the constant-width usage is
| considered "pretty awful", albeit readable. (Even in English,
| good typesetting is not constant width.))
| [...]
The same message also says something about a competing standard:
| [...]
| ISO10646: 32-bit everything code. Treats the various Han character sets
| as distinct character sets for each national usage, but unifies the
| Latin characters into a single set. Variable length coding possible
| to reduce space. Can degenerate to (something close to) 8859.
| [...]
_ Marco
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Oct 10 2002 - 13:38:38 EDT