From: terry@cs.weber.edu (A Wizard of Earth C)
Subject: Re: An alternative I18N paradigm
Organization: Weber State University  (Ogden, UT)
Date: Thu, 7 Jan 93 05:41:24 GMT

Vadim dragged me into this group by referencing an article I posted only in
comp.unix.bsd in a "mass-rebuttal" posted here.  I might as well attempt to
contribute.


In article <1hu9v9INN923@life.ai.mit.edu> glenn@wheat-chex.ai.mit.edu (Glenn A. Adams) writes:
>The real problem, at least as I see it, is that the locale model
>doesn't distinguish between the consumer of information and the
>producer of information.  It naively assumes that an individual
>end user must choose the manner in which (linguistically and
>culturally sensitive) information is to be presented, and that
>this choice can be determined by one fixed value parameter (i.e.,
>the locale setting).

I agree.  A pure locale model is unacceptable for multinationalization (use
in a multilingual environment).  This is the problem with "code pages" in
DOS.  I don't think that a "pure" locale is required, though.

[ ... ]
>However, if the producer is another individual, then
>the locale probably should be ignored, and information contained in the
>text itself should be consulted about matters such as character set encoding,
>font(s), language tag(s), or other presentation information.  In this case,
>the locale may be of help only in the case that such explicit information
>(encoding, font, etc.) is absent, and here, it may produce complete garbage
>if it makes the wrong assumptions.

Agreed; a compounding mechanism is necessary, potentially combined with
some method of per document attribution for the majority case of monolingual
documents, for use in a multinational implementation of locale to make it
useful.
>
>One may ask where 10646/Unicode fits into all of this?  It provides only
>a small part of the solution; namely, a single universal character set
>encoding rather than many non-universal encodings.  Of course, one might
>propose to solve a small part of the problem by using 10646:  use 10646
>for all encoded text.  However, as has been pointed out by Ohta-san and
>others, this doesn't solve many other problems, e.g., whether to use a
>Chinese or a Japanese font to display a given Han character.  So more
>is needed still.

Right; the above mentioned out-of-unicode band mechanisms for achieving
multinationalization, or some similar methodes, such as those used in
the ISO 2022 standard, but with the advantages of Unicode by virtue of
being layered on top of Unicode.

I see localized monolingual as the majority case, and multilingual as
the minority case.  Because of the fact that name space information is
not locale specific, you can't have a "/home" for an English user on
the system and a "/casa" for the Spanish user.  This means that an
actual multinational system which is not partitioned by language (chroot
with hard links or a translucent "namespace mount?) must have the ability
to display the character sets of all the languages in use on the system
at any time, if only for consistant opeartion of "ls" in shared or publicly
examinable directories.  This is a heavy burden for minority use to carry.

I further believe it to be a long way between the acceptance of a greater
than 16-bit font and the ability of, for instance, the X system to support
2^20 character glyphs downloaded to the terminal (20 bits has been
consistently used by "Ohta-san" (correctly, the honorific "san" should be
on the surname, and I am not sure if he has chosen a westernized ordering
on his name; you may be using the equivalent of "Glenn-san"... but I
digress 8-)) as a working approximation for his idea of the size requirements
of a non-unified set containing the non-intersecting "unification" of all
existing sets.

>I, for one, do not believe that 10646 will become universally used 
>in a fortnight.  Local and other standard encodings will continue to
>exist, probably forever.  So we need to start doing one thing very
>quickly: tagging character data as to its encoding.  Another thing we
>need to do, is add language (or writing system) tags to texts which
>mix multiple languages.  Alternatively, this could be done by tagging
>font runs and then associating languages with those runs [I do not
>advocate this method - I prefer explicit language or writing system
>tags].  Other kinds of tags might be necessary for certain types
>of processing, e.g., yomi (phonetic reading) tags for allowing the
>display of furugana, sort keys for allowing producer specified sorting
>behavior, and so forth.

Yes!

>10646 will not even address any of these matters.  However, Unicode may
>do so in the form of implementation guidelines or further work on I18N.

Yes!

>Nonetheless, I think that it is quite important for many parties to begin
>implementing such systems so that development of standard tags and tagging
>systems can proceed.  We need prior art and experience in these areas
>before effective standards can be developed with a reasonable hope of
>success.

Yes!

Thank you for your succinct statement of the issues!


					Terry Lambert
					terry@icarus.weber.edu
					terry_lambert@novell.com
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.
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