On Fri, 21 Jun 2002, Benjamin Kowarsch wrote:
> On Friday, June 21, 2002, at 12:37 , Eric Hildum wrote:
>
> > Note that Unicode does also include "dead" languages which are no longer
> > spoken - it really is intended to include everything.
Well, kind of. The 'dead' scripts (not languages, strictly speaking) have
mostly been assigned code points outside the Basic Multilingual Plane
(BMP). Certain popular operating systems do not support code points
beyond the BMP, which in UTF-16 are encoded using two 16-bit values rather
than one.
> which makes sense from the viewpoint of sciences like linguistics,
> archeology, history, philosophy etc.
I might take issue with your use of 'sciences', but yes, I'm sure it
is useful.
<snip>
> Also, I don't think that the Unicode standard will become more complex
> as a result of this as the mechanics for decoding and displaying
> characters should remain the same. All there is to it are more data sets
> that can be processed using the standardised process.
Right. There are some pretty complex rules for dealing with Unicode text,
but once you've implemented them there's not much need to add new rules
in order to support new characters.
> Of course, on a mobile phone it is very unlikely that you will ever need
> to add fonts for "dead" languages". Then again, never say never.
>
> Who knows, we may yet see VeriSign to offer domain names in Runic or
> Sumerian ;-)
I think it likely that those buying domain names with those funny
squiggles that foreigners use ;-) will also get or hold onto ones that
fall within the old domain name rules, for backwards compatibility. But
that could just be wishful thinking.
Received on Fri Jun 21 17:05:42 2002