Re: Putting the "World" back in WWW...

Richard L. Goerwitz (goer@midway.uchicago.edu)
Sat, 1 Oct 1994 02:14:37 +0100

>Chicago is a friendly environment for applications that wish to use
>Unicode for their character encoding... The primary reason the core
>of Chicago is not Unicode is the large existing code base that would
>have to be converted in the necessary timeframe.

I didn't mean to put you on the defensive. I'm delighted that Micro-
soft is trying to make Chicago "Unicode friendly." One of the great
desiderata for Windows has been a multilingual/multidirectional word
processing system like Nisus for the Mac. It'll be easier now to at-
tain that goal.

My sentiment, though, was that Unicode will never be the only system
around. Scripts constitute a field unto themselves, and I simply do
not feel that standardizing on one encoding system will ever satisfy
everyone or leave enough flexibility.

Doubtless, though, ISO 10646 will become increasingly important as
time goes on. Thanks for sticking your neck out. Mine's right there
beside it :-).

Richard Goerwitz
goer@midway.uchicago