Re: Document Status?

At 14:19 02/09/2002 +0200, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
>On Sun, Sep 01, 2002 at 06:34:34PM +0100,
>  Stephen Dyer <[email protected]> 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.

Regards

Steve