Re: ISO/IEC 10646 as Document Character Set

Amanda Walker (amanda@intercon.com)
Wed, 3 May 95 17:39:46 EDT

> But can we Westerners really dictate what the Japanese should do
> with their "corner" of the Internet??? Especially since the default
> is iso-8859-1, which means that we are not impacted.

>From a purely pragmatic standpoint, this is why I am interested in
some convention (even an admitted hack, like putting in a
specially-formatted SGML comment that I can look for) which could be
deployed by content authors, rather than being dependent on server
administrators revving their software.

Whatever my convictions about how content *should* be represented or labelled,
the Japanese in particular have a strong track record of doing precisely what
they want, whether or not it makes life difficult for anyone else. And being
a commercial vendor who receives a large chunk of revenue from Japan, I am
interested in solutions, even stopgap ones, that do not depend on convincing
the entire Japanese part of the Internet to upgrade before I can sell them
software. And right now there's nothing a content author can do to make
their content more intelligible, since all labelling is done by the server.
The same is true in Europe, also: Norway is still using three separate
character encodings, as are many other countries.

Amanda Walker
InterCon Systems Corporation