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William J. Kammerer said:
>I can't comment on the usability of any alphabet other than Latin, but
>is it "fair" that Chinese ideograms chew up tens of thousands of code
>points in Unicode? All the while Latin only needs a few dozen even when
>you throw in the accents and umlauts?
Is it fair that we got first crack (the base) at the Unicode
database? Is it fair that the rest of the world has to deal with all
the ASCII characters that we English speaking countries have imposed
on the Internet? Is it fair that we got all the "best" (keyboard
wise) dot com names? Is it fair that we were so shortsighted that we
used a seven-bit word instead of an eight-bit to resolve characters
-- and now, as a result everyone must use nameprep and punnycode to
translate all those tens of thousands of Chinese ideograms to ASCII
for resolution?
Keep in mind, that here are 260 TLDs. There are 7260 languages, some
of them having 2 or even 3 scripts. There are around 13000 dialects
of some importance (a language needs 100.000 people speaking it to
survive). E-colonization (dominance of an e-culture) should probably
lead to the initial deprecation of some languages, but recent history
shows a cultural resistance and resurgence after such a shock. So one
can consider that Internet will most probably help languages to
survive and develop: a 50,000 people minim might be a good rule of
thumb (think of trade, community idioms).
So roughly one can consider that 50,000 languages with possible 260
variants (at TLD level) are to be considered. Obviously most of them
will try to use the same script as much as they can for the TLDs. But
this cannot be considered as systematic all throughout a language. So
one has to consider 10 millions possibilities most of them synonyms
or not implemented. I am just talking of the legacy: PADs may
introduce 10 times this.
Now, considering all of this, when we (Latin users) first started the
Internet, we thought that seven bits could do it all -- what fairness
in the world was that?
No, I think the rest of the world got the fuzzy end of this lolly-pop.
tedd
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