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From: erc@pai.UUCP (Eric F. Johnson)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Unicode; Internationalizing char sets
Message-ID: <1671@pai.UUCP>
Date: 25 Feb 91 19:55:03 GMT
Organization: Boulware Technologies, Inc., Burnsville, MN
Lines: 38


InfoWorld (25 Feb 91) has an interesting article on internationalizing
character sets. According to the article, a joint venture, Unicode, Inc.,
will replace the ASCII with a 16-bit character set (with 27,000 characters
used). IBM, Apple, Sun, Microsoft, Next, Go (a pen-based company) and
Novell are members of Unicode. The article was rather scant on technical
details, which makes it hard to judge the merits of their approach.

Apparently, the Unicode character set will include traditional ASCII for
characters 0-127 and other national alphabets in the higher characters.
It looks like one can use at least Arabic, French and English in the
same document using Unicode. This seems to indicate that Unicode 
supports multi-lingual applications (which the X internationalization effort
has apparently chosen to put off, according to statements at the 5th
X Technical Conference).

I wonder what impact, if any, this will have on the internationalization (I18N)
efforts for the X Window System, with IBM, Apple and Sun as members of
Unicode.

From the purely selfish attitude of an application developer, it would be
nice if the X folks involved with internationalization would at least
_talk_ to the Unicode folks. 

Yes, I know that a character set is not all internationalization entails
(especially if it has to justify I18N and other jargon terms :-). But, it
looks like the industry is moving to standardize at least _part_ of
this (a character set).

Have fun,
-Eric


-- 
Eric F. Johnson               phone: +1 612 894 0313    BTI: Industrial
Boulware Technologies, Inc.   fax:   +1 612 894 0316    automation systems
415 W. Travelers Trail        email: erc@pai.mn.org     and services
Burnsville, MN 55337 USA