Re: Followup on I18N comments

Gavin Nicol (gtn@ebt.com)
Thu, 1 Dec 1994 08:28:58 -0500


>Unicode (ISO 10646) as a transfer form rather than UTF-8. However,
>the major difference between your suggestion and our implementation
>is that we require support for Unicode as a transfer encoding
>but do *not* require that all transfers be done in Unicode. If
>the source and target are both using, say, the same version
>of SJIS, we allow data to be sent without conversion. If the

Unless we define some method of negotiating character set encoding for
WWW, I think that the solution you outline above could not be
implemented, though given encoding negotiation, it obviously *is* of
great practical value.

Interestly enough, I spoke to 2 technical documentation
writer/translators who were vehemently against Unicode because it does
not support every possible character in the world... they noted that
there are more than 100,000 Kanji, most of which are not used except
in scholarly works.... and they are correct. It does not have codes
for some of the various Indian languages.

Still, as a lowest common denominator, I think it will handle most
(90%) situations, and I think *that* by itself, is a big step forward.