Re: Corrections to Glagolitic

From: Hans Aberg (haberg@math.su.se)
Date: Tue May 17 2005 - 05:50:40 CDT

  • Next message: Michael Everson: "Re: Corrections to Glagolitic"

    At 10:51 +0100 2005/05/17, Peter Kirk wrote:
    >Whether tweaked or not, the useful life of most standards in the
    >computer industry has been very low. Few of the ones in use 25 years
    >ago are still in active use now, although some remain as subsets of
    >more comprehensive standards (which is the alternative to improving
    >the standard). Any suggestion that Unicode will be around much
    >beyond the lifetime of its current proponents is sheer arrogance. I
    >know someone has suggested that it will last for 1000 years. I am
    >reminded of what happened to the Reich which was supposed to lat
    >1000 years.

    It can be instructive to check the history of ASCII. See for example
       http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII
    It says that the presently most widely used form is ANSI X3.4-1986.
    So that standard has been in active use only 19 years.

    So if ASCII based software now switches to use say UTF-8 instead,
    which does not seems to be so difficult to achieve, the 25 year limit
    on active use may apply to that one, too.

    -- 
       Hans Aberg
    


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