Re: [idn] Comments on protocol drafts

[James Seng <jseng@pobox.org.sg>]

RJ Atkinson wrote:
> All dialects of Chinese use the same written form,
> mentioned primarily for those without familiarity
> with Chinese.

Almost the same.

Hong Kong Cantonese have some special ideogram which exists in BIG5-HK but not
in Unicode. Similarly, Taiwanese have some phonetic glyphs which exist in
BIG5-TW but not in Unicode again. All of them are localised but very
important, at least to those who use it in Taiwan and Hong Kong. 

Standard Mandarin have about few hundred thousand ideograms which does not
exist on any commonly used character sets, including Unicode. Hopefully these
can be taken care of in UCS-4.

> Lets please move past this, but lets also remember that native
> users of Asian languages dwarf native users of European
> languages and try to find a language neutral (rather than merely
> European) approach to this issue.
>
> I'll also note that ISO-8859 and UTF-8 do not support all European languages
> equally well, nor does either support other Romanised non-European languages
> (e.g. Vietnamese) equally well.

Similar, there are other localized encodings used for European languages other
than the standard locale ISO8859 and CP125X. It appears I18N remains an
unfulfillable ideal whereby nothing right now can satisfy everyone. :-)

But having said these, while these are obvious problems to I18N,
unfortunately, 'fixing' these problems are beyond the scope of the WG.

-James Seng