Doug,
you say you imagine the following exchange is "off-topic for IETF".
Please reread the RFC 3066 bis, and your own accompanying proposed
registry accepted by the IESG after the Tunis deal. And reread RFC
3935. _You_ trapped the IETF in pretending it is competent in matter
of language identification, language tagging, script issues, national
lingual policies, etc. to the point to take the world leadership (and
the RFC 3935 accompanying responsibilities) with the mission to
influence people to design, use and manage the Internet in that area.
And now you come and say this is off-topic?
Obviously it WAS off-topic. But you made it a core topic for the
IETF. Saying it is off-topic now will not address it. I was
interested in knowing how you are going to assume it. Now we start
understanding.
Masataka Ohta does not discuss an ISO matter. He discusses an IETF
langtag issue. I fully agree the IETF does not count the expertise
and cross-expertise, and most probably the interest, necessary to
seriously discuss IETF langtags. Nevertheless every IETF langtag
issue is now going to escalate to this mailing list, the IESG and
ulitmately to the IAB as the self-assumed world's authority on the matter.
I used the appeal now in limbo to make the IESG clarify their (your)
contradictory position. I feel that a community having a problem to
decide between ASCII Courier and ASCII PDF/A for its own use may not
be very excited about deciding for the world how to best support
kanji and hanzi, etc.
jfc
At 08:46 07/12/2005, Doug Ewell wrote:
Masataka Ohta <mohta at necom830 dot hpcl dot titech dot ac dot jp> wrote:
since most computers sold all over the world now
come with at least one perfectly good Unicode-based font with
Chinese-style glyphs and another with Japanese-style glyphs.
Now, you admit that the problem does exist.
I admit there are stylistic differences between the way the *same
characters* are written in the Chinese and Japanese
traditions. Anyone who knows about East Asian writing knows
that. I do not admit there is a problem with unifying them in a
character-based (not glyph-based) encoding.
I can't print Japanese characters in China where Chinese-style
glyphs are used by default.
No, you can't print Japanese *glyphs* in that situation. Characters
and glyphs are not the same thing.
With both Chinese and Japanese glyphs are available, ISO 2022 works
perfectly fine with corresponding Chinese and Japanese character
sets. On the other hand, language tags are useless from the beginning
to distinguish characters. One can represent some content in Japanese
language by ASCII, Japanese characters or Chinese characters.
If you (or your software) can use the distinction between ISO
2022-JP and Big-5, or EUC-TW, or CNS 11643, or whatever to determine
whether to display Japanese or Chinese glyphs, you (or your
software) can do the same by using the distinction between "ja" and
"zh". If you can use ISO 2022 controls to switch between "the
Japanese repertoire" and "the Chinese repertoire," you can do the
same with language tags. This is a question of style, not legibility.
If you are saying?I'm not sure about this?that the same Ie ISO 10646
code point needs to be displayed in both the Japanese and Chinese
glyphic traditions in the same Japanese-langauge text, and that only
ISO 2022 is adequate to indicate which glyphs to display, then I
ask: how is this problem solved in handwritten text?
I think you do your countrymen a disservice by claiming that they are
incapable of reading kanji printed in a Chinese-style font.
Red herring.
Just as most native users of Latin alphabet can read Greek alphabet,
most Japanese can read Chinese glyphs, which is not the point at all.
Actually I think you are being too kind to most native users of the
Latin alphabet. They can certainly read Greek Î', because the Latin
A is derived from it. They might get terribly confused by Greek Î?
and Ρ and Χ, which are not equivalent to the Latin letters they
resembleâ?"unless, of course, they are familiar with the use of
Greek letters in professional or fraternal organizations, which is
its own red herring.
Most scholars of writing systems disagree with your premise that
Chinese hanzi and Japanese kanji are two separate writing systems in
the same way that Latin and Greek are separate. Latin and Greek are
not simply glyph variants of one another.
You should admit that ISO 10646 useless for internationalization.
I do not. ISO 10646 is a cornerstone of modern software internationalization.
I imagine this is off-topic for IETF.
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