From: Asmus Freytag (asmusf@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Mon Sep 20 2004 - 14:34:08 CDT
At 10:32 AM 9/20/2004, you wrote:
>Michael Everson schrieb:
>
> > I would like to see a range of samples in several publications
> > published in several languages and more than one country. That would
> > make a stronger case for it.
>
>I'll be able to dig out some more samples from other books published by
>different publishing houses. However, they are all in arabic and all
>printed in Saudi-Arabia.
>
>As I wrote earlier, they sign in question seems to be restricted in its
>usage to Saudi-Arabia. In other arabic countries the international
>COPYRIGHT SIGN is used for book in arabic. I don't have anything printed
>from Saudi-Arabia in other languages than arabic, it would be interesting
>if the SAUDI-ARABIAN COPYRIGHT SIGN occurs there, too.
There's no requirement that a character be used in multiple countries.
If Unicode is to be the *universal* character encoding standard, it must
cater to both local and international use of characters, otherwise we
are back at square one where people devised local character sets for
their needs.
However, multinational and multilingual use is an indicator that there is
a wide-spread user community that agrees on the use of that character.
Looking for evidence like that, where available, protects against encoding
short-term usages that are perhaps motivated by a particular fad or
political constellation.
From the users' perspective, if their is a need to use a particular symbol,
they don't care whether this is limited to their environment or not, they
need to use the symbol, and we owe it to them to accommodate their need
in our standard - assuming that Unicode is in fact the bottleneck
in a given case.
Consistently responding to - and occasionally anticipating - the needs
of our users strengthens the standard overall.
A./
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