Re: Level of Unicode support required for various languages

On Oct 25, 2007, at 11:41 PM, [email protected] wrote:

> An even more effcient solution as far as code points, would have  
> been to encode the components of Chinese characters, not precomposed  
> charcters, this would take up over 10 thousand code points to encode  
> the current 70 thousand unicode charcters, and include over 80% of  
> all CJKV submissions. In this case new submissions would be  
> resticted to new components. This way all cjkv would be in the BMP.
>


Unfortunately, this would have been impossible to do.  It would have  
broken backwards compatibility with pre-existing standards, it would  
have required technical support beyond the abilities of then-current  
systems, it would have made East Asian texts take even *more* space  
than they do now and made them more difficult to process.  Even now,  
there is no really satisfactory way of representing the complex way of  
arranging bits and pieces properly into the final ideographs in plain  
text.

But yes, it would have saved us lots of space.

=====
John H. Jenkins
[email protected]