Re: Making message/rfc822 boundaries visible

["François Pinard" <pinard@iro.umontreal.ca>]

Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.cygnus.argh.org> écrit:

> The main problem with Unicode was that in the official manual, only
> Chinese glyphs were printed, which extremly annoyed some Japanese people
> (who, on the other hand, are used to write short Chinese citations in
> Japanese text using the Japanese glyphs ;).

I'm surely not in a good position to argue in the place of Asian people,
nor give too much interpretation to their position.  On the other hand,
if they tell me they are not satisfied with Unicode, it would be very
pretentious from me (or from almost any Westerner, in fact) if I started
arguing with them.  They know a great deal better than I do what the matter
is, and so, I'm willing to respect them.

Unicode does not have much technical limitations, nowadays, to handle
more than 16 bits per character.  Yet, this was not the original plan,
and it required some doing to get there.  So, Asian reluctance to Unicode,
which might have started technical, became to be more political over time,
and solving the technical aspects do not fully repair the politics.

Let's face it, Unicode lost its technical virginity for good since it was
first laid out (sic).  People still being much attracted by its "purity"
might not be fully willing to implement all of it, and the simpler parts
of Unicode are just not enough to fit all of the bill.  This yields all
sort of contractual lies: "See all that it will do for you!" to convince
other to embark, followed by some more intimate "I'll do that part which
interest me most, and postpone even thinking about the rest" that soon
becomes a strong incentive to say "You are wrong in what you want", or
even more astonishingly, one step further, "Forget it, this is not Unicode".

Because of my `recode' little tool, it happens that I speak with many
people about charsets.  On the way, I clearly saw that may proponents of
UTF-8 are fanatical enough, that I would myself be very frightening if I
were Asian.  Asian and me have this in common (:-), that we put our culture
long before technical considerations.  I'm far from knowing the story, but
I guess that if Unicode listened better, things would be different today.
Asian probably understood they will be better served by themselves, anyway.

P.S. - Unicode is not a problem for the little me.  French is well supported,
out of the box.  UTF-8 is very elegant, technically, I like it a lot.

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard