Re: Level of Unicode support required for various languages

On 10/25/2007 10:41 PM, [email protected] wrote:
> Even more could have been done at the start of unicode and CJKV.
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> An even more effcient solution as far as code points, would have been 
> to encode ...

In theory, and with lots of hindsight, perhaps.

But in the political and technical reality of the early years of Unicode 
(and ISO10646), there was not a whole lot of room for radically 
different approaches.

For a new technology to be successful, you need to have both enough new 
features to make adoption of the technology worth the effort, and a 
migration strategy (strategy of small steps) that allows porting to the 
new technology in manageable and relatively predictable ways.

There are many design elements in Unicode that were adopted for 
migration purposes - some were less necessary in hindsight than others; 
likewise some of them proved more costly than expected, even to 
implementations not requiring those particular migrations.

One of the benefits of hindsight is that the true magnitude and scope of 
certain collections has become much better understood as these 
collections have become cataloged in Unicode. Also, the deficiencies of 
particular cataloging choices are now well-known and understood.

As a result, alternative representations, building on the amassed 
knowledge base, but distinct in their approach, could be created, that 
may prove potentially superior at certain tasks. Whether such 
alternative representations would be limited to rendering, processing, 
data compression or whether they would be attractive as interchange 
format remains very much to be seen (if and when somebody sits down and 
actually cranks out such a system).

But whatever form it takes, it would be subject to the same kind of 
forces that shaped Unicode's early stages, except that it's 20 years 
later, and general state of the art and the knowledge of scripts, 
characters, their use and implementation have not stood still. So, while 
the influence of these forces may well lead to different particular 
results now, it does not mean that very different approaches would have 
been feasible then.

A./
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