Re: [idn] Re: Chinese Domain Name Consortium (CDNC) Declaration

[hoho <hoho@iis.sinica.edu.tw>]

"John H. Jenkins" ¼g¤J¡G

>
> As Ken well knows.  It's a nasty, nasty problem in general, and one
> which
> Unicode is trying to address.  At its last meeting the UTC agreed to
> request that the IRG start to work on definitive variant data for the
> CJK
> repertoire of Unicode/10646.
>
> If there is any body in the IT standardization community which should
> own
> the problem, it's the IRG.  It's international, multilingual, and has
> the
> longest and best experience with the characters involved.

Hope that the Han variant problem can be solved in IRG. The people I
consulted are Prof. C.C. Hsieh of our institute and Chritian Wittern of
Kyoto University. They are both experts in Han variants. There is also
a online variant dictionary published by Ministry of Education, Taiwan.
In the past, the CCCII group of people also contributed enormous amount
of efforts on Han variants.

> >>
> >>   B. The move to Unicode implementations means that mingling
> >>      of traditional and simplified orthographies is easier.
> >>      In effect, users now have the rope to hang themselves,
> >>      if they so desire. Whereas, before, the constraints of
> >>      the deployment of IME's and fonts generally meant that
> >>      you couldn't easily mix SC/TC, even when the code page
> >>      nominally supported it.
> >>
> >
> > I would accept A with minor modification as follows. B is not true.
> >
>
> I would disagree here.  As you point out, Windows 2000 has the ability
> to
> mingle traditional and simplified orthographies because of Unicode 2.0.
> Mac OS X now has the problem, too, because of Unicode 3.1.  In the past
> on
> the Mac, if you wanted to do Japanese you used the Japanese "code page,"
> if you wanted to do traditional Chinese, you did the traditional Chinese
> "code page," and if you wanted to do simplified Chinese, you used the
> simplified Chinese "code page."  This inherent link between code page
> and
> nuanced version of a script was something Unicode intended to break.  In
> the past, one had to deliberately work to mix the two, and the mixture
> was
> generally obvious.  This isn't true now.

Thanks, I accept it. I am sorry that I didn't quite understand some English
sentences in statement B previously.

>
> > Without a internationalized dictionary for Han variants, the current
> > IDN proposals are bringing side-effects to users and holders of
> > domain names of Han characters.
> >
>
> I agree with Ken that it's not clear how *anything* could both include
> hanzi in IDN *and* be free from unpleasant side effects.

This is hard indeed. But, by decomposing name equivalence matching
function into the IDN protocol, registration policy and the recently
proposed IRNSS protocol, it is likely to minimized its unpleasant side
effects.

> >
> > I appreciate your loving for Japanese. But, if you do care about
> > Japanese, why did you ignore Chinese and Taiwanese, and perhaps
> > even more silent Japanese and Korean out there?
> >
>
> I'm sure it wasn't intentional.  I believe that Ken's point is that you
> can't do a Chinese-only solution here.  (And I'll naturally bring up the
> Cantonese speaking population of the world, as just adding to the mess.)

This is fine. But, I think you also understand. If having some people to
wait could help some other people from being damage, then we choose
to help, don't we?

>
>
> ==========
> John H. Jenkins
> jenkins@apple.com
> jenkins@mac.com
> http://homepage.mac.com/jenkins/