The latest from those fun-loving guys at the W3C...
(Full text posted to the Unicode public forum by the W3C).

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----- New Core Work -----
The core working group's draft charter includes some new work items. These are generally related to the findings of the current Web Services Task Force:

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2. Locale and Language Identifiers on the Web. Recent IETF activity is in the process of replacing the existing standard for language identifiers (RFC 3066), which has been widely cited in W3C specifications (HTML lang, XML xml:lang, XML Schema, XML Query, RDF, and many others). The changes in the RFC on which these are based require that policies and guidelines be developed for current and future specifications.  In addition, in order to enable multi-locale operation of Web services and to create a locale negotiation layer for them, there needs to be a standardized method for identifying locales and locale preferences on the Internet.

Deliverable: Develop a guidelines document for incorporating the RFC 3066
replacement into W3C technologies to be published as a Note.
Deliverable: Develop a specification for locale identification on the Web and
promote to Candidate Recommendation status.

3. Collation Identifiers. W3C technologies have struggled with the problem of collation, sorting, and ordering on the Web. These efforts have been hampered by lack of a clear, open, consistent, and standardized way of referring to collation sequences. Efforts to produce an Internet-Draft need to be re-energized

Deliverable: Coordinate efforts to develop an Internet-Draft and submit to the IESG on the IETF Standards Track.

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Addison P. Phillips
Director, Globalization Architecture
webMethods | Delivering Global Business Visibility
http://www.webMethods.com
Chair, W3C Internationalization (I18N) Working Group
Chair, W3C-I18N-WG, Web Services Task Force
http://www.w3.org/International

Internationalization is an architecture. It is not a feature.

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I will keep an eye on this. The bit where it says: "Recent IETF activity is in the process of replacing the existing standard for language identifiers" is especially interesting for us.

Arcane Jill

no offense, but, uhhh..... did you invent unicode, or something?  you seem pretty attached to it.

In article <cdjstk$1r79$1@digitaldaemon.com>, Jarrett Billingsley says...
>
>no offense, but, uhhh..... did you invent unicode, or something?  you seem pretty attached to it.

Please don't give AJ a hard time. She's already in a bad mood today.

I don't know much about Unicode, but I'm sure that its popularity (and necessity) will continue to increase as the world becomes more interconnected. There are quite a few fans of Unicode hanging around this newsgroup. There's no need to single anyone out.

jcc7

ouch! I know you said "no offense" but, uhhh, it sounds accusatory to me. I hope Arcane Jill doesn't get ticked off at us that she goes away. I'm glad she "attached" to unicode or D or whatever.

"Jarrett Billingsley" <kb3ctd2@yahoo.com> wrote in message news:cdjstk$1r79$1@digitaldaemon.com...
> no offense, but, uhhh..... did you invent unicode, or something?  you seem pretty attached to it.
>
>

i said "no offsense" for a reason :(  please don't take it the wrong way! i'm just wondering why jill is so interested in unicode, that's all! honestly!

In article <cdjstk$1r79$1@digitaldaemon.com>, Jarrett Billingsley says...
>
>no offense, but, uhhh..... did you invent unicode, or something?  you seem pretty attached to it.

Frankly, I'm very glad that between AJ and Hauke we have some quite capable Unicode folks.  Internationalization is a very important but complicated and often ignored issue, and it will be quite a selling point if D can get it right the first time around.  I've peronally found AJ's references and such to be very useful, especially since they inspire me to read up on new things :)


Sean

Jarrett Billingsley wrote:
> i said "no offsense" for a reason :(  please don't take it the wrong way!
> i'm just wondering why jill is so interested in unicode, that's all!
> honestly!

Standards, man.

Unicode provides a very good standard to manage text that makes use of
international characters.  Sure, most european encodings allow you to write spanish, italian, etc.  But they don't usually include greek and russian, etc.

The best of all worlds will allow all major known character sets to be represented with one encoding.  Including the far eastern languages.

Unicode is much bigger than D.  We should all be happy about it, and support it to the best of our abilities.

In article <cdjstk$1r79$1@digitaldaemon.com>, Jarrett Billingsley says...
>
>no offense, but, uhhh..... did you invent unicode, or something?  you seem pretty attached to it.

Actually, the original post of this thread wasn't about Unicode at all, it was about ISO language and country codes, and was an extract of some sort of press release from the W3C. I lurk on the Unicode public forum (and post rarely, and then mostly with questions), and that's where I encountered the W3C statement. I thought the W3C statement might be worth mentioning here because locales are under discussion now (or were, when I posted that).

I'm not especially attached to Unicode. I know enough about it to know it's not perfect, full of all sorts of redundancies, characters that got inserted for historical or legacy reasons, and so on. There are also characters that got rejected which I think should have been accepted (e.g. the Klingon alphabet). And then there was the whole debacle about originally defining it as sixteen bits wide and then realizing that wasn't going to be enough - a total cock-up by anyone's standards. Even the Consortium agree that if Unicode were to be designed from scratch today, it would be very different. BUT - it's the only worldwide character standard we have, and there isn't likely to be another one in the foreseeable future (because general opinion is that we don't need two conflicting worldwide standards). So we live with its flaws.

But these guys are hot on the localization issue. For example, right now they are discussing (among other things) some esoteric stuff about accent-ignorability for fuzzy-string-matching in Indic scripts. The contributors to such discussions include native speakers (often representing national governments or committees) and so generally can be assumed to be giving good advice to the Consortium. In short, their data is likely to be more reliable than, say, ripping source code off from what other computer languages have done!

Plus I've implemented some Unicode algorithms before (badly), and learned enough from those mistakes not to make them again.

Does that help?

Jill

In article <cdjtsb$1ron$1@digitaldaemon.com>, J C Calvarese says...

>Please don't give AJ a hard time. She's already in a bad mood today.

True, but I should apologize for misplaced blame. I haven't quite got the hang of bereavement yet. Yesterday I was fine and happy, the world and the D forum looked fun, and life felt good. Today the whole atmosphere of the world seemed different, and everything upset me. Sorry for bringing that to the forum. I probably came back too soon, but, like I said, yesterday it didn't seem to be a problem so I got overconfident.

I'm still taking a rest from writing code though (except for my employers, but they pay me). This is probably a good thing for D as well as for me, as I'd probably introduce lots of bugs if I tried it right now.

Anyway, I have to disappear again for a couple of days, starting tomorrow, for the funeral, so after that you probably won't hear from me until next week.

Jill

PS. I /like/ the advice "Please don't give AJ a hard time". Can we keep it even after I'm back to my normal self? Maybe it could go in the style guide  :)

*hangs head in shame*  yes, that helps.  i'm sorry.