Re: Putting the "World" back in WWW...

Richard L. Goerwitz (goer@midway.uchicago.edu)
Mon, 3 Oct 94 16:51:49 CDT


>> I've never heard of a client that correctly handled
>> bidirectional wordwrap.
>
>The Macintosh. 4 years (or more) ago. Native in the OS!!! It's called
>AppleScript.

Don't confuse the Mac's OS with Motif. Sure the Mac has multilingual
facilities (WorldScript), but very few software packages for the Mac
actually take advantage of them. For example, Microsoft has stated
that they have no plans to enhance Word with WorldScript technology,
and that they intend to stick with the localization model. So just
because the Mac has multilingual facilities doesn't mean that soft-
ware (like Word or Motif)is necessarily multilingual as well.

It's also worth nothing that you have to buy modules for all of those
extra languages on the Mac, so it's not like we can just plug and
play.

Still, you're right that the people at Apple have thought these is-
used through and resolved some of them - years ahead of most other
major vendors. Just look at Windows struggling; Unix is positively
pathetic. Not to say that Unix is pathetic in other respects. It
it the programming environment of choice for anyone who knows what
he or she is doing (and plans on doing it in English :-)).

Richard Goerwitz
goer@midway.uchicago.edu