At 5:29 PM +0200 8/30/08, Per Jessen wrote:
Well, I guess - sort of. Just because something is Unicode does not
make it global, in my opinion.
In fact, I would argue that most of Unicode is _not_ global at all.
Think about the alphabets such as: Arabic, Armenian, Bengali, Bopomofo,
Cyrillic, Devanagari, Georgian, Greek and Coptic, Gujarati, Gurmukhi,
Hangul, Hebrew, Hiragana, Kannada, Katakana, Lao, Latin, Malayalam,
Oriya, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, and Tibetan - and they were all in the
first version of Unicode. (I'm quoting from wikipedia).
Why does those languages appearing in Unicode NOT make Unicode
global? Maybe we have a difference in they way we perceive Global.
Unicode is setup to contain ALL the languages in the world, not replace them.
This has come about from an exhaustive (and still continuing)
analysis of every glyph known to mankind. It is an Herculean effort
to categorize all languages and dialects known to man -- that's the
purpose here.
So, if you find a code-point in the Unicode dB, then it's a good
chance that it's an honest character found in some language or
charset somewhere.
You also said:
I was actualy very surprised to see that such arbitrary symbols have
been opened for use with e.g. .com. The national registrars around
Europe have quite a limited set of special chars that can be used -
AFAIK none of them include the special symbols that you've registered.
There's nothing arbitrary about these symbols -- they are symbols.
Symbols have meanings too.
The DOT COM TLD registrar simply made the decision to allow symbols
to be registered while other TDL registrars have different rules --
some do, some don't.
I'm not sure that I had anything to do with their (IDSN WG) decision
process, but I was certainly there to support my vested interest.
Many times I felt that I was going to lose my names. In fact, I was
only allowed to register my names ($100 a pop) on the basis that a
test period would ensue and if they did not find any problems, then I
could keep them -- however, if they did find any problems, then I
would lose them without refund. Fortunately, no one protested and I
still have my names.
Are they worth anything? I dunno, but I'm betting that they will be
someday -- hopefully in my lifetime.
To bring this thread back to php, that's what the mb_ functions are
about, namely dealing with Unicode strings. The combination of
Unicode and the mb_ functions provides us with the ability to be able
to communicate in every language in the world. That's not a small
accomplishment.
Cheers,
tedd
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