Re: Big5 "mostly" complete

[Roy <roytam@gmail.com>]

On Sun, 18 Aug 2013 04:57:57 +0800, Rich Felker <dalias@aerifal.cx> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I just committed a revision to iconv Big5 support, adding current
> standardized extensions up to nearly the maximum possible level. The
> whatwg definition of Big5 is still a bit bigger, so maybe we should
> research whether its additions make sense to support. There would be
> no size or performance cost to supporting them, since they just fill
> in holes in the table without extending the table size.
>
> I'm still unclear on what, if any, action needs to be taken for
> extended Taiwan variants of Big5. In theory UAO could be added (minus
> the PUA mappings) but it's quite large and I still don't feel like I
> have a good understanding of whether there are users who need it.
> Whatwg has no mention of it with encoding standards
> (http://encoding.spec.whatwg.org/) and only Mozilla seems to support
> it. If it's needed in Taiwant for representing native-language text in
> a Big5-based encoding, that's a strong argument for supporting it
> anyway, but if it's just for representing mixed-language text (as a
> poor substitute for Unicode) I feel like it would be hard to justify
> including it, and maybe we could think about later supporting it as a
> local nonstandard encoding via charmap files...
>
> Comments?

Both Big5-UAO and Big5-HKSCS are needed for those Taiwan people and Hong  
Kong people.
For Big5-UAO, there is some commonly used dingbats(for example "♡" mark)  
and numeric representations(for example "①") are in Big5-UAO but not in  
CP950.
and Big5-UAO is still being used not only in ptt.cc telnet BBS, but also  
in  text data files(file lists/cue sheets) because of not-supporting UTF-8  
in applications(for example, Perl File-system I/O in windows, CD-Rippers).
for Big5-HKSCS, it use used for storing commonly used Cantonese ideographs  
(for example, "𨋢" means "lift" in Cantonese) in Hong Kong.

>
> Rich