🚀 go-pugleaf

>>It is true that Vadim's character set always carries language
>>information along with it, while bare Unicode does not. A Unicode based
>>system, though, will require more than the bare character set (which is
>>why I refer to it as a "Unicode-based system," rather than simply as
>>"Unicode"). 
>
>Until we can figure how to attach the information, we can't use
>Unicode or "Unicode-based system".

The acceptance of a standard for attaching this information is important
and what I can do with Unicode in the absence of language tagging is
somewhat limited. I find "we can't use" unnecessarily hyperbolic and
pessimistic: ISO 8859/5 (Latin/Cyrillic) also contains no language
identifiers of any sort, either as higher-level tags or through
language-specific character ranges. That is, the need for language
information in coded texts is real, but their absence from character
sets is representative of many ISO standards and is not unique to Unicode.
I agree that language information will ultimately have to be
standardized, but I do not believe that this information necessarily has
to be an inherent part of the character set itself.

As for "figuring out how to attach this information," the problem is
far from solved, at least insofar as there are no widespread
implementations of standardized systems to deal with it, but SGML is
one candidate. I mention this not as a specific endorsement of SGML
(perhaps there are better structures and SGML is hardly in widespread
use), but as a reminder that there are efforts underway to develop a
standard for attaching language information. I, too, impatiently await
their ripening.

--David
--
-- 
Professor David J. Birnbaum         djbpitt+@pitt.edu [Internet]
The Royal York Apartments, #802     djbpitt@pittvms   [Bitnet]
3955 Bigelow Boulevard              voice: 1-412-687-4653
Pittsburgh, PA  15213  USA          fax:   1-412-624-9714