Re: URL internationalization!

On Sat, 22 Feb 1997, Masataka Ohta wrote:

> And, ISO 10646 can't handle multiple scripts of Hanzi and Kanji.

This issue has been mentionned before. Of course, ISO 10646
can handle CJK(V) ideographs (the C stands for Chinese, the
J for Japanese, the K for Korean, and the V for Vietnamese),
called Hanzi in China and Kanji in Japan.

UNicode/ISO 10646 doesn't distinguish, for the same ideograph,
whether it's Chinese or Japanese, as it doesn't distinguish
for an ASCII letter whether it's English, French, German,
Italian,...

There are some customary differences in the details the same
character is usually printed in China and in Japan, but these
differences also exist for Latin; the "ct" and "st" ligatures
that you can find in the average French paperback would look
very strange in German. Given the wide range of fonts, these
differences are very small in both cases.

URLs are identifiers, and for similar things such as personal
and place names, the customary typographic treatments e.g.
in Japanese newspapers is to use the Japanese "version" of
the character for Chinese and Korean names, and so on.

Having an artificial distinction between Chinese (which comes
in two variants, traditional and simplified), Japanese,
Korean, and Vietnamese CJKV ideographs in identifiers such
as URLs would lead to a multiplication of the problems
that Masataka rightfully hinted at in the case of Latin
and Greek A/Alpha. Indeed, if anything in the treatment
of CJKV ideographs in Unicode will turn out to cause
problems in URLs, it is the fact that in some cases,
there exist two or three very close variants for the
same character for backwards compatibility issues.
Fortunately, this is less than 1% of the cases that
would be created if each of the typographic traditions
had separate codepoints.


Regards,	Martin.