OT: Unicode Unification Objections

[François Pinard]

"Dennis E. Hamilton" <infonuovo at email.com> writes:

> When subject matter experts from important language and cultural groups
> suggest that a unification in Unicode is objectionable, I think one
> should listen more carefully, even if it involves something that is hard
> to make sense of from within *our* cultural and language illusion.

This should be especially true for the Unicode consortium itself.

Many of us know that Unicode favours decomposed forms, but as a way to
get Unicode accepted by nations, Unicode provided pre-combined characters
to those.  Unicode would have plainly failed if it did not offer the richer
nations at least the capability of a fixed number of bits for any character.
But yet, there is a never-ending regret within Unicode designers to return
to combining, and consider that pre-combined is a kind of error or ugliness.

Not long ago, Unicode and W3C got together to decide that pre-combined
characters that did not make it in time for Unicode 3.0 were to be left
in decomposed form on the Web _forever_.  The arguments given were "Web
stability", using as an example the ease of comparisons while searching.

This looks extremely shocking to me.  Richer or more technically advanced
nations were served first by Unicode, and most of the African continent, to
take a rather bold example, has been left aside, despite it uses hundreds
of scripts.  What does it mean?  This is condemning in advance any script
not yet integrated to suffer the complexities of combining, and so, the slow
down of technical progress of those countries, which are too slow already.

Try to imagine for a moment that Unicode and W3C were forcing Americans to
use a variable number of UCS-2 characters for different "ASCII" characters.
You will better feel how deeply it would handicap all software development.
Americans would have quickly dismissed Unicode.  And if it was by some
magic, it was imposed to them, you'd not only get a riot, but a world war.

National needs should go _ways_ before sparing bits or easing the life of
browser makers.  Sad to say, there is something deeply wrong with Unicode.

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