Re: [idn] Dots, and a path to working IDNs

["Sean X. Zhang" <sean_xzhang@yahoo.com>]

--- liana.ydisg@juno.com wrote:
> 
> 
> On Fri, 1 Jun 2001 02:55:34 +0000 "Adam M. Costello"
> <amc@cs.berkeley.edu> writes:
> > liana.ydisg@juno.com wrote:
> > 
> > > Allow me to comment on your UTF-8 as a long term solution.
> > 
> > If I understand correctly, you are proposing an alternative model 
> > for
> > representing characters.  Currently, characters are represented as
> > indices into a table.  If a character is not in the table, it cannot 
> > be
> > represented.
> > 
> > You are proposing that instead of a table of characters, we have a
> > table of character-building-blocks, and to represent characters as
> > instructions for how to compose them from the building blocks.  This
> > would allow new/obscure characters to be used without deploying new
> > fonts everywhere.
> > 
> > (You also propose to represent the building blocks phonetically 
> > using
> > ASCII, but I think that's an orthogonal issue.)
> > 
> > Is my understanding roughly correct?
> >
> 
> Yes.
>  

This is indeed an interesting idea and has been discussed numerous times
in other forums. To "represent" characters as described above would have 
to introduce fundamental changes to all applications and all operating
systems utilizing the characters. That's what ISO-10646 and Unicode 
are about. I'd prefer to work within the constraint of existing encoding
mechanisms. I may be wrong, but I don't think this list is the most 
appropriate forum for introducing these changes. 

Sean X. Zhang

>  
> > It's an interesting idea, but dramatically different from the 
> > current
> > text model.  I suspect that you'd have to change lots of things in 
> > all
> > applications and all operating systems to make this work.
> > 

....

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