Re: Unicode, character ambiguities

[Glenn Maynard <g_lutf8@xxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Jan 10, 2002 at 01:28:53PM -0800, Edward Cherlin wrote:
> > Hmm.  Looks like Unicode language tags are a much better solution.
> 
> Unicode language tags are heavily deprecated. Language tagging is 
> markup, and there is no point pretending you have plain text when you 
> mark languages. 

Heavily deprecated?  They were only added to the main body of the
standard in Unicode 3.1, which isn't a year old.

> If you want tagging in plain text, use a standard. As far as I can 
> tell, the best available standard for such things is XML, which 
> defines Unicode as its preferred character set.

The reason these characters *exist* is for specifying the language where
a markup language like XML isn't an option.  That's the case with Ogg tags.

> I see no reason to encode language in Ogg tags. Users should be able 
> to choose a Unicode fontset that suits their needs for displaying all 
> languages. 

The entire discussion is about the ambiguities that prevent displaying a
character in its native form without extra information.  If your needs
include "use font A for language A, and font B for language B", and
languages A and B share codepoints, you need language tagging in some
form; no fontset will be able to figure it out.  Feel free to show that
no people exist who want to do that.

-- 
Glenn Maynard
--
Linux-UTF8:   i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive:      http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/