Talk:Unicode/Archive 1

message: This paragraph was added to the start of the article:
:Unicode is a standard used in computer software for encoding human readable characters in digital form. The most common encoding is the ASCII code, which can encode a maximum of 127 characters, which is enough for the English language. As computer use spread to other languages, the shortcomings of ASCII became more and more apparent. There are many other languages with many other characters; Asian languages in particular contain many, many characters.
I removed it because it is inaccurate (It overplays Unicode-as-a-standard rather than Unicode as a consortium that produces lots of standards), confusing (its mention of ASCII is not clearly historical), and adds no information that isn't already in the article. I assume, however, that it was added because someone thought the existing first paragraph was unclear, so I'm open to suggestions about how to improve it. -- Lee Daniel Crocker 12:20, 9 November 2001 (UTC)
thread_title:  Intro 

message: I think section 0 which currently reads could be improved by changing: In computing, Unicode is the international standard whose goal is to specify a code matching every character needed by every written human language, including many dead languages in small scholarly use, to a single unique integer number, called a code point.
To: In computing, Unicode is the international standard whose goal is to specify a code matching every character needed by every written human language, including many dead languages in small scholarly use such as foo and bar as well as [some other good example, perhaps a made-up language?], to a single unique integer number, called a code point.
I think the intro would be better by adding two examples there, furthermore i think is the international standard should be is an international standard, or has it been approved by a major authoraty as the standard? --  Ævar Arnfjörð [ Bjarmason]   17:44, 2004 Oct 5 (UTC)
::The parts of Unicode which are also in ISO 10646 most likely define it as  the standard, aslo given the fact that the maintaince of the ISO 8859 has been put into hibernation. Pjacobi 20:27, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Section 0 improvements 

message: I can't believe that Unicode 5.0 doesn't have American Sign Language characters.  Linguistic research during the past thirty years has demonstrated that American Sign Language (and indeed any of the world's indigenous sign languages) meets all of the requirements for human languages - it is a rule-governed, grammatical symbol system that changes over time and that members of a community share  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.40.46.183 (talk) 22:34, 19 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: New sections should go at the end — I generally assume that stuff near the top has already been resolved. ASL is not a written language, so it doesn't warrant being in Unicode. I don't know of any reasonable amount of text in Unicode, and if there is any, I suspect it's largely to help people learn Unicode. ⇌Elektron 11:22, 22 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Unicode Lacks ASL glphys 

message: In the section that talks about pre-composed characters vs. composing with several codepoints, how about mentioning that this capability opens up lots of opportunities for phishing once URLs are more universally excepted in UTF-8? For example, once accented characters are common in website addresses, links with a pre-composed "è" and separate "e" plus an accent will point to different sites, but look identical to the user (in fact the intent is for them to look the same). I don't know if this info belongs here, but it's an interesting tidbit.
Rlobkovsky 00:06, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: If and when URIs start supporting characters beyond ASCII in a standard way, some decomposing must take place, as according to the principles behind unicode the precomposed character à is exactly equivalent to ` + a. Any future internet domain funkèynáme.ext will have to point to the same IP(v6?) address for all its possible decomposings. 
-- Jordi·✆ 12:26, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)

text: According to the article on IDN, names are supposed to go through Nameprep which normalises to NFKC. I imagine it's left to browsers to always normalise names (so a decomposed e-plus-accent will be recomposed), and for registrars to reject names which aren't normalised. There are more serious attack (characters which look the same), also mentioned in the article, and for that reason, they fixed Safari so that a name like xn--pypal-4ve.com looks exactly like that, and not like "pаypal.com" (the first "a" is actually a cyrillic small a). Elektron 15:00, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Phishing