OT [Way OT]: Unicode Unification Objections

[François Pinard]

mjackson at wc.eso.mc.xerox.com (Mark Jackson) écrit:
> Franc[approximately]ois_Pinard <pinard at iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

> > Agreed that Japanese people are themselves on this.  Some are ready to
> > accept Han unification together with Microsoft Windows, if they really
> > have to be bundled together, they just don't care.  Others do.

> Has their Justice Department determined whether said bundling is, in
> fact, an anticompetitive attempt to stamp out other Han vendors?

Are you really asking me? :-) :-)

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

> You see that my newsreader handles the cedilla in your name just fine,

You probably mean that your newsreader did not handle it at all, and
that Latin-1 is displayed by default on your system :-).  The message
containing the above quote, as I received it, lacks MIME headers, so there
is no way to ascertain that the contents has to be interpreted as Latin-1.
It just happened to right, by random chance.  My original message left my
machine with MIME headers, which were ripped off somewhere on the way.
I'm not familiar with where Usenet currently stands for MIME support,
yet the need for it, or something equivalent, is real.

> [...] the one in the header gets munged into an imbedded break into the
> ISO-8859-1 character set.

There is no way to ascertain that this 8-bit code (meaning c-cedilla
in Latin-1) has to be interpreted as Latin-1 in headers, unless this is
explicitely stated in some way.  Even if you had correct MIME headers to
describe that the message body is Latin-1, one may not induce that headers
_also_ are Latin-1, as it is not necessarily the case (Polish or Chinese
people might well write to me in French, for example).  RFC 2047 describes
how to code non ASCII characters in headers.

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