Subject: Re: [idn] Dots, and a path to working IDNs

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 30 May 2001 23:39:52 -0700

Allow me to comment on your UTF-8 as a long term solution.

Most people in the world using a limited number of basic phonetic symbols
to
communicate.  This point can be shown by looking through Unicode tables.
Even for Chinese, it can be handled by 25 letters as the minimum.  We can

infer that the number of symbols in Latin alphabet is an optimum number 
for majority people in the world.  

The most charllenge problem is dealing with Chinese symbols, there are 
100,000 on the rise and the often used ones are over 8,000(depending on
who's 
viewpoint this is.) each is cramed inside a square space.  If we can
represent them 
with the existing small set of phonetic symbols why should we bother with
UTF-8?  
IBM started 8-bits characters with international users in mind.  But that
solution 
was not effective and the industry  knows the reasons. 
 
I can see supporting UTF-8, such that  we may have International
Alphabet, Cyrillic,
 Arabic with a larger keyboard for the user to take the full usefulness
of 8-bits. 
Chinese have been tried large keyboards, and a medium 10x10 keyboard, but

only the English 3x10 has survived.  Without significent improvement for
the
 users, who would dive into UTF-8 trouble?  

Liana Ye

---

From: C C Magnus Gustavsson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 31 May 2001 16:03:44 +0200 (MET DST)

> for majority people in the world.  

The number of consonants may be fine but the Latin vowals are at least
by far too few to represent the sounds of a large number of languages
(including English, btw).

> was not effective and the industry  knows the reasons. 

I guess that I'm not part of "industry" then after all, because I sure
don't know neither that 8 bit characters are not effective nor the
reasons. Perhaps you could explain them to us?

>  users, who would dive into UTF-8 trouble?  

I'm sorry but I don't understand. What are you suggesting? That we
stick with ASCII and don't bother about anything else? Are you really
trying to say that you don't see any improvement with using anything
else than ASCII?

/Magnus

---

From: "Adam M. Costello" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 02:55:34 +0000

> Allow me to comment on your UTF-8 as a long term solution.

If I understand correctly, you are proposing an alternative model for
representing characters.  Currently, characters are represented as
indices into a table.  If a character is not in the table, it cannot be
represented.

You are proposing that instead of a table of characters, we have a
table of character-building-blocks, and to represent characters as
instructions for how to compose them from the building blocks.  This
would allow new/obscure characters to be used without deploying new
fonts everywhere.

(You also propose to represent the building blocks phonetically using
ASCII, but I think that's an orthogonal issue.)

Is my understanding roughly correct?

It's an interesting idea, but dramatically different from the current
text model.  I suspect that you'd have to change lots of things in all
applications and all operating systems to make this work.

Regarding the use of English keyboards, I'm not sure what your point is.
The representation of text in a file or on a wire is unrelated to how
users type that text, right?

AMC