Re: Blueberry is not "closed" (was: Closing Blueberry)

[Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>]

At 1:16 PM -0400 7/19/01, John Cowan wrote:


>I didn't "deny" it (I can't), and I merely said that we didn't have
>an authoritative list.  If someone wants to produce such a list, I
>will be happy to be sure the idea is considered.  As it is, the notion
>is an uncashable cheque.
>

They're less than twenty of these. Such a list is not at all hard to construct. To be specific:

UTF-8
UTF-16
ISO-10646-UCS-2
ISO-10646-UCS-4
ISO-2022-JP
Shift_JIS
EUC-JP
JIS X 203
JIS X 213
CNS-11643
VHN_01-1998
PKS_5700-3-1998
TCVN_5773-1993
GB_18030

The last half of these need to be checked, especially with regard to preferred names. I just pulled them out of the Unicode 3.1 technical report. But that's it. Maybe there's an extra Chinese or Japanese set that I missed and we can add, but they're simply aren't that many of them. 

Even if we forget some, and leave a couple out, it's not a fatal mistake. Every legal XML character is a legal Unicode character. As long as documents can be written in Unicode, we don't necessarily need to support every variant character set on the planet. In some cases this is a very good thing. For instance, before Unicode there was no standard character set for Ethiopic. Essentially, every time you changed fonts, your character encoding changed. Unicode 3.0 provided the first widely accepted character set for Ethiopic. 

In fact, the same is true for almost every character added in Unicode 3.0. The proximate cause for most of these characters not being added pre-3.0 was that the Unicode folks couldn't just copy them out of existing national standards like they could with most of the 2.0 characters. 
-- 

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