Re: Hebrew

[Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de>]

Mike Brenner <mikeb@mitre.org> writes:

> BTW this is important for quite a few languages, not just
> Hebrew. It is fundamental for Arabic, Biblical Hebrew,
> Farsi, Ancient Greek, etc., per se.

I believe that some languages (very Ancient Greek) use both writing
directions alternatively. There isn't much software which supports
that, if any at all.

> This is like the question of whether coding should be done
> in UTF-8 or use a 16-bit character encoding. UTF-8 has
> advantages for websites in simple English and most American
> emails.

The robustness and statelessness of UTF-8 is helpful if you're using a
Unicode-aware terminal in the UNIX environment.

> Various 16-bit codes have advantages for Asian
> languages, eCommerce encodings, multi-language web sites.

There are many, manu national standards, and I think that's a problem.
For a developer who is interested in internationalizing his software,
it's very difficult to obtain all the necessary documentation.
Implementing Unicode is probably much easier.

> The question is, is it important for English speaking people to make
> codings, software, web sites, advertisements, etc., that work well
> for people of many different languages?

Well, my native language is German, so my answer is yes, definitely.
(However, I'm not sure about web sites and advertisements.  Software,
howver, should be able to cope with text in a multitude of languages,
if it deals with text in any way at all.)

> Or, to restate that question, is it important for Asia to use the
> same Unicode, the same character encodings, and ultimately,
> compatible web pages with Europe and the Americas?

I think so.  At the university, I think many students would be glad if
they could use computers to read and write in their native language.
We can't install software versions for 100+ languages, so it's
important that existing software is internationalized.

> It is amazing that in 2001 the fonts that come with American
> computers and web browsers don't include most of Unicode yet.

This might change quickly as Microsoft is rapidly embracing Unicode
and is even implementing proper input methods, joining behavior etc.