Re: Choosing right character representation for i18n issues

[Otfried Cheong <otfried@cs.ust.hk>]

 > > > Still another point is that I have heard that not all problems that
 > > > the CJKV users have with UTF-8 are of a technical nature, some of them
 > > > are political.
 > > 
 > > As a Japanese friend of mine put it nicely recently: many of the
 > > Japanese "experts" who engage in anti-Unicode flame wars are usually
 > > hardcore geeks with imaginary requirements far away from every-day
 > > reality. We have such geeks on the Unicode mailing list for almost any
 > > common language, not just Japanese.


First of all, I don't think "CJKV users have problems with UTF-8".
This is really mostly a Japanese phenomenon, with Unicode (not UTF-8)
popularity in Japan being so low that companies use it internally but
won't tell the public.

Unicode is used intensively in Chinese information processing, and the
only grief that Koreans have with Unicode is that the beautiful Hangul
support through conjoining Johab is a purely theoretical feature
without implementation.

When visiting Todai, I asked some Japanese students why Japanese
didn't like Unicode, and the answer was quite surprising:

First reason: Unicode is by Microsoft, and Japanese do not like
Microsoft.

Second reason: Han unification is bad. (They believed that with
Unicode you will see non-Japanese glyph variants in your text, and
there is no way to avoid that.)

More seriously, there was a paper critizising Unicode in the Japanese
Society for Information Processing's (IPSJ) Magazine (Vol 39, No.4,
Apr 1998) by Eiichi Wada, a senior Japanese scholar.  His main
concerns were Han unification (merge was done by shape, but meaning is
more important), maintenance of Unicode vs national encodings, the
need for code conversion for I/O, and the fact that Unicode is a
character repertoire without defining glyphs.  In the same magazine is
a nice retort by Masami Hagiwara, who basically says that Unicode is
the choice of a new generation (and stresses the importance of Unicode
for an open environment).

Otfried


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Linux-UTF8:   i18n of Linux on all levels
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