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July 1997
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Although I praise the increasing use of Unicode (and its UTF-8 form) ("Unicode Evolves," March), I would caution against prematurely dropping support for the primary 8-bit character sets. In particular, failing to support all six of the bandwidth-friendly MIME-standard ISO 8859 Roman code pages (Latin-1 [Western], -2 [central European], -- 3 [Esperanto], -4 [Baltic], -5 [Turkish], and -6 [extended Baltic]) would open applications providers to accusations of
Internet censorship and gagging of linguistic diversity. I look forward to e-mail and browsers implementing Unicode, but hope they won't continue to suppress the netizen's ability to read messages and Web pages in Latin -2 to -6.
Aaron Irvine
Belfast, Northern Ireland
Unicode in all forms (UCS-2, UTF-8, and so on) contains those characters, so a brows
er or mail client can continue to handle those languages either through 1:1 mapping-that data can be converted in both directions between ISO 8859-x and Unicode/ISO 10646-or directly through Unicode, since it is a superset and includes all the required characters. Unicode actually helps these languages because you no longer have to switch code pages to move between those characters. In the past, the software industry often defaulted to the requirements of the largest installed base, at the expense of other languages.--Ken Fowles
Matthew Wilson more...
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