From: Gregg Reynolds (unicode@arabink.com)
Date: Tue Jun 28 2005 - 17:52:35 CDT
I'm obviously not so good with email clients with multiple accounts...;)
attached mail follows:
Michael Everson wrote:
> Are you CRAZY?
Ah Mr. Everson. Your style amuses me, even though I do occassionaly
want to strangle you.
To answer your question: technically, yes. However, my suggestion is not.
Unicode is a character encoding. Explicitly not in the service of
languages. Furthermore, it is not and I sincerely hope it does not
pretend to be, a guide to the linguistics of written languages. If it
does have this pretension, I for one can assure you it fails miserably
when it comes to Arabic.
And even furtherfurthermore, I'm not aware that "eliminating all
competing methods of encoding text" was one of Unicode's goals. Why
would it be? It's an exchange encoding, no more, no less. If I or
anybody else wants to design an encoding, and go to the trouble of
adapting a piece of open source software (say, Vi, or Mozilla, etc.) to
accomodate that encoding - well, what of it? Why is that any of
Unicode's business? After all, ask yourself why legacy compatibility
was required in the first place. Maybe many reasons, but one of them
was surely so that software that uses a legacy encoding internally can
continue to function without modification, with only an import/export
filter. So if that is good enough for software supporting legacy
encodings, why not for new encodings? Surely you don't believe the
Unicode Church is the One True Way.
-g
>
> At 17:03 -0500 2005-06-28, Gregg Reynolds wrote:
>
>> So instead of ranting about plots and conspiracies, why don't you try
>> something constructive? Design a Tamil encoding from scratch, with no
>> regard at all for legacy encodings, for the sole purpose of serving
>> the Tamil-speaking community. Then hack up some open-source software
>> to work with your design. Then you can find out if anybody really
>> wants to use it. If they do, then you can come back to Unicode and
>> make an argument based on facts on the ground, instead of political
>> begging.
>>
>> -g
>
>
>
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