Re: Info on Internationalization

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

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Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

> (I found the terminology in the document interesting, though -- they
> refer to UFT-8 as a "charset".  Hee hee hee hee!  Ok, they explain
> that it's really a CES (character encoding scheme), but it's a charset
> anyway.  (Not a character set; that's different.  A charset.  :-)

I had a similar problem in `recode'.  Users did convince me that since
the UTF-8 encoding scheme is exclusively used with the UCS (Universal
Character Set), it is kind of conceptual overkill to consider a double
layer, and just simpler to take UTF-8 as a charset.  This *is* abusive,
of course, but I now think it is handy to accept it that way.

Also, beware that all UCS related things (Unicode, ISO 10646, UCS-N and
UTF-N) are a religious issue for many people.  It relies to Han unification
(for example, attributing a single code to similar Chinese and Japanese
glyphs), to which many Japanese *strongly* object.

So, any blind UTF-8! UTF-8! UTF-8! attitudes are prone to be very irritating
to some people, and we should be careful about our own attitudes.  Of course,
UTF-8 has its own elegances and various technical merits, which surely appeal
me a lot, but we should never loose sight and perspective that charsets
(or encodings) are there to serve people, and not the other way around.

We surely may discuss at length for Mule or against Mule, which currently
ignores UCS (yet this is in the process of changing).  The FSF choice
favouring Mule was indeed taking a position within a religious fight about
Han unification, and we know that the FSF likes politics :-).  For the
poor little me, Mule is not technically appealing (to put it very mildly!).
However, there are two great qualities I recognise in Mule: the first is the
incredible amount of knowledge and experience which has been melt within it
(especially about input methods), the second is to bring a discording voice
in our Americanized views, remembering us that we should not bulldoze people.

-- 
François Pinard                            mailto:pinard@iro.umontreal.ca
Join the free Translation Project!    http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard