Re: [idn] Comments on protocol drafts

[tinwee@pobox.org.sg]

Yes of course you are right about the pronunciation codepoints
but they are unlikely to be used for domain names 
or possibly even URLs. So it is an academic point.

Operationally, all dialects of Chinese use the same written form
(either traditional or simplified).
As for historical Chinese, I have less experience with that
so I can't comment, but it is unlikely to have anyone
wishing to use that in domain names. Of course, the
Premier Zhu Rongqi has one of his missing from the
GB (or even Unicode), so there are unusual characters currently in use
that are missing. So we might not be able to have a URL with his
full name but that is a not a dns-specific problem for us to address.

tin wee

Dirk-Willem van Gulik wrote:
> 
> RJ Atkinson wrote:
> >
> > At 22:00 07-02-00 , C C Magnus Gustavsson wrote:
> > >Ah. Sorry about that. I was comparing only to Mandarin.
> >
> > All dialects of Chinese use the same written form,
> > mentioned primarily for those without familiarity
> > with Chinese.
> 
> Well, (Mr Seng, correct me if I am wrong :-) that is not
> quite accurate. If you look in a typesetting manual (say
> the Ikarus set from URW) you will see that Taiwanese
> has some pronounciation/soundex codepoints which are
> extra to unicode. Same for very formalized mandarin,
> like what ones use to reprint (historic/legal) documents.
> 
> In fact over 1.700 extra 'casts's are needed beyond unicode
> by a good university printer to cover the asian main land.
> 
> So it is just like:
> 
> > 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.
> 
> Unicode is the closest thing we have; but it is not perfect
> yet.. and will propably always lag behind a bit.
> 
> Dw