[5954] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: Putting the "World" back in WWW...
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Ludeman)
Fri Sep 30 19:59:52 1994
Date: Sat, 1 Oct 1994 00:57:37 +0100
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Reply-To: johnl@microsoft.com
From: John Ludeman <johnl@microsoft.com>
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
----------
| From: "Richard L. Goerwitz" <goer@midway.uchicago.edu>
| To: John Ludeman; <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
| Subject: Re: Putting the "World" back in WWW...
| Date: Friday, September 30, 1994 9:54AM
|
| >A good solution for the multi-lingual problem would be to use Unicode
| >as the character encoding. Issues of left to right and right to left
| >text are simply resolved by the Unicode character code (no language or
| >locale information needed).
|
[...]
| Of course, let me admit to you on the side that it would be ideal to
| have an all-encompassing scheme we could all agree on - one that all
| computers would use from now until the next millennium. But it ain't
| gonna happen. Despite Microsoft's support of Unicode, for instance,
| I don't see any intrinsic support for it in Chicago, despite the huge
| amount of resources Microsoft has to devote to it. If Microsoft it-
| self isn't able to jump on the bandwagon, how can you expect, say,
| people in the Soviet Union to do it?
Chicago is a friendly environment for applications that wish to use
Unicode for their character encoding. It has full support for
character conversion plus Unicode versions of TextOut and CharWidth
Window APIs. The primary reason the core of Chicago is not Unicode is
due to the large existing code base that would have to be converted in
the necessary timeframe. Portions of Chicago are Unicode. Windows NT
is fully Unicode.
|
| Aside from the practical matters, I might add, there is also the lar-
| ger reality that many don't agree with the approach the Unicode Con-
| sortium has taken. It would be downright inhospitable to force such
| people to conform. Very un-Web-like.
Microsoft is absolutely committed to open standards, especially on the
Internet. Promoting what we feel is the best approach to a particular
problem should not be interpreted as forcing people to conform.
Thanx,
John
