Aargh

[venta]

OK, so html isn't usually the first area of legislation you consider when you take over the world, but:

When I am dictator, every character set will have exactly one encoding. Forget your latin1, latin2, latin3. There will be latin, and you will like it.

Furthermore, each encoding will have exactly one name. Anyone who calls an encoding by a non-standard name will be sneered at, and will not be pandered to by the poor sods who have to put encoding support into browsers.

Not that I'm bitter today, you understand :)

Comments

[neilh.livejournal.com]

You got my vote.

While you're at it, could you get rid of homoglyphs and multiple representations of identical characters. And make everyone standardise on a single multibyte representation mechanism. And make codepages a things of the past. And...

[venta.livejournal.com]

The job of Grand Vizier is yours :)

[neilh.livejournal.com]

I say we invade France.

[venta.livejournal.com]

OK. July 14th ? They'll all be busy.

I'll organise the British troops, you invade from Japan.

[neilh.livejournal.com]

OK, remind me closer to the time, its all a bit hectic
at the moment and I'm prone to forgetting things.

[wimble.livejournal.com]

Oh, we (ie. the OED) actually need glyphs that unicode doesn't support. Can't tell you off-hand what they are, but I've got the general impression of "Middle English".

[neilh.livejournal.com]

Can't you use some of the 'locally defined' codepage
up in the 0xfe?? range (or whereever it is)? Admittedly
this'd mean arsing about creating appropriate glyph sets.
How many symbols you need?

[wimble.livejournal.com]

No idea: I'm not actually dealing with the Unicode support. Ill have a poke around, but your mention of codepage bothers me: we need this to be able to use this on web pages, rather than DOS (or derivative) base applications, which is what code page implies to me.

[neilh.livejournal.com]

Ah, OK, privately defined characters aren't the
answer then. Short of sending out a whole bunch
of .gifs I can't think of a sensible one...
doubtless there is an answer though.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

doubtless there is an answer though.

Unicode 4.0?

There isn't really much excuse for characters essential to the OED not being included. Perhaps OUP should be making a formal approach to the Unicode consortium.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

we need this to be able to use this on web pages

Although even if the required characters were in Unicode, you'd still have the problem that they wouldn't be in the average font...