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From: harald.alvestrand@elab-runit.sintef.no
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Unicode; Internationalizing char sets
Message-ID: <1991Feb26.094326.3341@ugle.unit.no>
Date: 26 Feb 91 09:43:26 GMT
References: <1671@pai.UUCP>
Sender: news@ugle.unit.no
Reply-To: harald.alvestrand@elab-runit.sintef.no
Organization: ELAB-RUNIT, SINTEF, Norway
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UNICODE is (IMHO) another US loser.
It is (as far as I know) heartily disliked by the Japanese, Chinese, Korean
and others whom IBM et al are trying to say that they make it for.
The reason is that they try to squeeze characters that look *almost* the same
and mean *almost* the same thing into a single character position.
Kind of like writing French without the accents: Readable, but UGLY.

The ISO guys are gathering around ISO 10646, a *32-bit* (gasp) character set
with compaction methods that make it compatible with ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1).

                   Harald Tveit Alvestrand
Harald.Alvestrand@elab-runit.sintef.no
C=no;PRMD=uninett;O=sintef;OU=elab-runit;S=alvestrand;G=harald
+47 7 59 70 94