Re: [idn] Document Status?

[Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer@nic.fr>]

On Sun, Sep 01, 2002 at 06:34:34PM +0100,
 Stephen Dyer <steve@uk.com> wrote 
 a message of 82 lines which said:

> Firstly, I believe we should examine a process that deploys quickly the 
> fullest possible range of 8-bit ascii characters.
> Many of these, especially accented characters, were sidelined by us Anglos 
> or unnecessarily hi-jacked by operating systems (especially by Unix). This 
> is a quick fix, but will give great benefits to the populations of Western 
> Europe, South America, much of Africa and ex-colonies of Western 
> "Imperialist" nations in general.

Since you work on the .eu project, I will limit myself to Europe, but
the problem is much broader. Even only for Europe, your suggestion
is not a good one.
 
There is not one 8-bits character set which can be used for all the
European languages, unless you convince many countries to change their
default script :-)

In the present European Union, Latin-1 and Greek are both required and
they already do not fit together in 8-bits charsets. In 2004, Latin-2
countries like Poland will join the EU.

So, although "Let's make the simple thing first and we'll see later
for the complicated one" is often reasonable, it cannot work here. We
need Unicode from the beginning (handling Unicode only is simpler than
handling Latin-1, Latin-2 and Greek, and waiting Bulgaria to join with
its Cyrillic alphabet).