From: Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven (asmodai@in-nomine.org)
Date: Thu Feb 07 2008 - 04:48:04 CST
-On [20080207 06:39], Michael S. Kaplan (michka@trigeminal.com) wrote:
>In a world where the "next million users" are making less than $2 a day and
>are unlikely to be buying a computer anytime soon, and the majority of
>cellular phones available will not support anything needing more than one
>byte for most letters, I'd say that the "obsession" with size is no an
>entirely outdated obsession....
Sorry Michael, but to me this makes no sense logically.
If they have no computers now, the impact of such storage dynamics for
scripts will not impact them one iota. Ergo, it's a moot point. At the point
where they will get a computer the storage devices we now use are long since
pushed to commodity status. Debating the what-if point is not interesting
from a YAGNI (You Ain't Gonna Need It) design point of view.
Do cellular devices nowadays even support a full BMP? I very much doubt it,
so they will almost always use some optimization scheme or specialized
encoding. I would need to check GSM specs to see if SMS or MMS has anything
to say about it.
>Also, when one looks at scripts side by side placed a decade ago for
>arbitrary reasons that lead to any inconvenience on the part of those who
>might want to use the script, it is preferable to have a better argument
>than "just cuz" because if that were so the companies selling primarily in
>countries that DO consider this to be an outdated notion could have
>allocated according to putting the more emerging markets in the smaller
>spaces and the more advanced ones in the three-byte area....
And just what would you want to do about it? Given Unicode's charter such a
relocation of an encoding block would violate the stability clause. And then
the real issue starts in the matter that everyone's $FAVOURITE_LANGUAGE will
need to be in the 1 or 2-byte encoding range.
-- Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven <asmodai(-at-)in-nomine.org> / asmodai イェルーン ラウフロック ヴァン デル ウェルヴェン http://www.in-nomine.org/ | http://www.rangaku.org/ We have met the enemy and they are ours...
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