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.
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 :-)
snip..
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).
If you deploy the fullest possible range of ASCII codes, in *practice* a
huge range of usable domains will become available. It may be that by
allowing "élève.com" you may eliminate a Bulgarian word that happens to use
exactly the same code string but it's a very long shot and results in a
happy Frenchman and an unhappy Bulgarian. At the moment they are both
unhappy, and this sort of intersect can happen right now anyway.