Re: XML Blueberry

[John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>]

Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:

> And make no mistake, this is just the first step, not 
> the last. Unicode's got at least two more major iterations left in it 
> that will force changes in XML parsers if we tie XML that closely to 
> Unicode. It's not just blueberry but raspberry and blackberry too, and 
> maybe other flavors!


It depends on how the Core decides to handle future versions.


> For instance, Mongolian can be written in Cyrillic. 
> (Blame the Soviet Union for that, but it is a plausible workaround for 
> tag names in Mongolian.)


Greek can be written in Latin characters, and is every day in Internet
email.  That doesn't make it a good idea.   Mongolian script is now
official in Mongolia, and its spelling conventions are totally different
from the Cyrillic version: this is not like Azerbaijani or Serbian.


> As a demonstration, I'd want to see at an absolute minimum that it was 
> possible to use a computer in such a language (e.g. Amharic, Tigre, 
> Khmer) without also having some competence in a more prevalent script 
> like Latin or Cyrillic. I'd also want it demonstrated that this was done 
> via a different character encoding, and not merely by a font mapping to 
> some ASCII superset. (This is how the limited Ethiopic software I've 
> actually seen has all worked.)


This demand is not reasonable.  People who need to use computers will
use whatever kludges they can: that should not estop them from changing
to Unicode when and as practical.  One element of that practicability
will be full support from markup languages.

-- 
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