Re: ISO charsets; Unicode

Stavros Macrakis (macrakis@osf.org)
Wed, 28 Sep 1994 13:47:05 -0400


...You have to reckon with the possibility that you will use one
encoding scheme, but different transliteration systems, depending
on the language.... I certainly would not want to render Persian
with the same system used for classical Arabic, though they are
written with the same basic glyphs.

I have certainly agree that having _both_ encoding information and
language information is useful. In my judgement, encoding information
is crucial (without it, the bits are meaningless) while language
information is simply useful (having it allows additional
functionality). Neither is a good substitute for the other.

-s