From: Gregg Reynolds (unicode@arabink.com)
Date: Wed Jul 06 2005 - 19:35:36 CDT
Kenneth Whistler wrote:
First off, thank you very much for taking the time to provide a
thoughtful, non-polemical response.
>
> Your task, instead, would be to create a consensus within the
> character encoding community (and the implementing information
> technology companies) that the existing Arabic encoding is so
> flawed that it requires introduction and implementation of
> a competing, distinct textual representation in Unicode.
>
> That, sir, is a *very* high mountain to climb, at this point.
>
But is is completely hopeless? An infinitely high mountain is one
thing; a very high but finite mountain is another.
(Aside: "character encoding community"? What is that? Who is that?
Does it make any effort to reach out to underrepresented language
communities? Does it represent any interests other than corporate or
government one?)
I would like to repeat for the sake of avoiding flame wars, that I don't
have a problem with Unicode. It is what it is; it cannot possibly be
all things to all people. On the other hand, I do believe it is
possible to make a compelling argument that "the existing Arabic
encoding is so flawed that it requires introduction and implementation
of a competing, distinct textual representation in Unicode". But up to
now at least, my conclusion is that it is a total waste of time and
effort to try to introduce such a representation to Unicode, because the
fundamental design principles of Unicode are contrary to such a
representation. Not because Unicode is intentionally evil, but because
it is an engineering design, not a philosophy, it has many masters to
please, and many of those masters have powerful economic incentives to
oppose a proper encoding of Arabic (not to mention other RTL languages.)
Hence I conclude the way to go is to design an encoding independently
and hope for the best.
Sincerely, believe it or not,
gregg
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