<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /> </head> <body><div class="auto-created-dir-div" dir="auto" style="unicode-bidi: embed;"><style>p{margin:0}</style>There are at least two possible classes of downsides to Unicode, one class being the way that The Unicode Standard itself works, and another class being the politics of the way that "The Unicode Consortium", whatever that term means, operates.<div><p><br></p><p>For example, some time ago I put forward a proposal to use Variation Selector 14 to signal a request for a character to be displayed in italics. The proposal was turned down.</p><p><br></p><p>Having a character to turn on italics and a character to turn off italics is forbidden because that would make the system stateful. Alright, fine. Yet a proposal to allow characters to be made italic one at a time, so not stateful, is turned down because italics spans a number of characters in a word, a sentence or a paragraph. Yet making characters italic one at a time is how it has worked with metal type for over five hundred years.</p><p><br></p><p>Always the policy of "use a higher level protocol". All about layers decided decades ago. Decades before many aspects of modern information technology were invented. </p><p><br></p><p>I accept that having a character to turn on italics and a character to turn off italics as I suggested years ago would make Unicode stateful, I have learned.</p><p><br></p><p>Yet I put forward a suggestion that resolved that objection and yet suggestion that was stopped, in my opinion unnecessarily because as far as I know the idea could be useful and would be harmless and could be ignored by anyone who did not want to use it.</p><p><br></p><p>In this and in other ways, "The Unicode Consortium" is restricting progress.</p><p><br></p><p>William Overington</p><p><br></p><p>Thursday 2 September 2021</p><p><br></p><p><br></p><p> </p><br><blockquote style="margin: 0 auto; padding: 0 2em; border-left:2px solid #00ADE5; white-space: pre-wrap "><br><br>------ Original Message ------<br>From: "Doug Ewell via Unicode" <unicode@corp.unicode.org><br>To: unicode@corp.unicode.org<br>Cc: "'Phake Nick'" <c933103@gmail.com><br>Sent: Thursday, 2021 Sep 2 At 18:30<br>Subject: RE: Unicode Teaching in Universities<br><br>Phake Nick wrote:<br>
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<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tbody><tr><td width="3" bgcolor="#888888"></td><td width="3"></td><td width="3"></td><td>but in recent years I feel like I have hear more about the downside<br>
of using the Unicode system as a tool developed from early era of<br>
computing before internet became popular and the use of such system<br>
to digitalize the entire world's text,<br>
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It would be interesting to hear specifically what the "downside" is. Maybe Phake Nick can elaborate, or ask those who are unhappy with Unicode to elaborate.<br>
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Does the fact that Unicode was originally developed more than 30 years ago (I guess that's the "early era") bother people? How does "before internet became popular" play into this? A universal character set, free from the context-sensitive character set switching used in the JIS X standards, should be an ideal solution for the Internet.<br>
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Are users in Japan still concerned about Japanese characters requiring 3 bytes in UTF-8 as opposed to 2 bytes in the JIS X standards? Does UTF-8's immunity from cross-site scripting attacks not outweigh this for Web purposes?<br>
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Do they still want to use out-of-band character-set designators as font selection hints? Are there still objections to CJK unification? And so on.<br>
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--<br>
Doug Ewell, CC, ALB | Lakewood, CO, US | ewellic.org<br>
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