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From: cirby@vaxb.acs.unt.edu
Newsgroups: comp.society.development
Subject: Re: Low-cost Usenet (ASCII/Unicode)
Message-ID: <1991Jun19.191057.1@vaxb.acs.unt.edu>
Date: 20 Jun 91 01:10:57 GMT
References: <78978@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU> <1991Jun14.100804.4867@iccgcc.decnet.ab.com> <1991Jun15.023819.5589@newshost.anu.edu.au> <1991Jun18.065605.6955@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG>
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In article <1991Jun18.065605.6955@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG>, xanthian@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Kent Paul Dolan) writes:
> Probably be a useful idea to start off by defining
> some "do and don't do" rules (or "motherhood and
> apple pie" baselines) for the vaporware plug and
> play Usenet system under consideration.

> 12) Respect for local character sets; probably best
> to just start with a 16 bit or variable length
> character size; this implies that each document
> transmitted should have a header that identifies
> language and character set, so that we monolinguals
> can pick our favorite language out of a wider
> discussion. While I love English as a standard
> language for world discussion, and it is probably
> the most common second language in the world, it is
> still not reasonable to ask local conversations to
> occur in English.

Read the July 1991 issue of _Byte_.

There's a good article about the new expanded character sets,
including Unicode (which is being pushed by most of the big
American computer companies.  Two byte codes, giving 64K
characters.  That's enough for the complete alphabets of *all*
of the major languages (including the complete ideographic
set for Chinese/Japanese/Korean), and space left for local
dialects and/or special agreed-upon cases.

It's certainly needed, and as long as the ISO is sitting on its'
collective thumbs, Unicode has a shot...

-- 
|        C Irby       cirby@vaxb.acs.unt.edu        cirby@untvax         |
|  Between the politicians, the lawyers, the bureaucrats, the insurance  |
|  salesmen, and the TV commentators- not to mention the fools, lovers,  |
|  and idiots- we may be the only two honest people left in the world.   |
|  And I can see that card you have up your sleeve...                    |