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From: tacke@orville.uni-mainz.de (Markus Tacke)
Subject: Re: [386BSD] What about localisation?
Message-ID: <3VO9RIR@minnie.zdv.uni-mainz.de>
Sender: tacke@orville (Markus Tacke)
Nntp-Posting-Host: orville
Organization: Johannes Gutenberg Universitaet Mainz
References: <1992Dec7.182103.1799@rdrel.relcom.msk.su> <1992Dec8.214215.24804@fcom.cc.utah.edu>
Date: Thu, 10 Dec 1992 11:25:02 GMT
Lines: 46
In article <1992Dec8.214215.24804@fcom.cc.utah.edu>, terry@cs.weber.edu (A Wizard of Earth C) writes:
.........
|> In any case, I would prefer any Unicode standard, however badly implemented,
|> to XPG3, which would fail to deal with anything but Western Europe and
|> North and South America, in my opinion.
|>
|> Another thing which requires consideration is a set of standardized
|> messages translated into all supported languages through whatever
|> localization mechanism we will use for messages in the shell, programs,
|> and etc. for perror and family. This will tend to go a long way towards
|> usability in an international forum -- and probably constitutes our best
|> bet for high return on the effort we invest, guaranteeing at least base
|> functionality in supported languages
..........
|> I suggest we attack it in this order:
|>
|> 1) Pick a standard for encoding (I vote Unicode).
|> 2) Pick a standard for storage (I vote character set attributed files
|> to avoid stream encoding while maintaining the benefits of 8-bit
|> storage for most languages).
|> 3) Create an X environment capable of supporting all languages by
|> default (Again, I vote Unicode).
|> 4) Build some tools for running two character sets simultaneously
|> (requires combination of Anglicized/Localized encoding and
|> adat entry mechanisms).
|> 5) Provide basic error message and prompting translations (requires
|> fluently bilingual volunteers).
|> 6) Perform a code integration (probably at the 0.2 level, although
|> this may drag on until 0.3).
|>
For the last month one of my tasks was to support our University Library with their Computers
and I had varoius discussions with them and with the programmers of the catalog systems.
>From this Discussions i have to conclude:
YOU ARE RIGTH, Terry, we need it and we need it soon.
Best would be, we don't get a stable system without it.
Markus Tacke
(tacke@goofy.zdv.Uni-Mainz.DE)
Unix und Netzwerke
Zentrum fuer Datenverarbeitung
Johannes Gutenberg Universitaet Mainz
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They call me benchmarkus -- I say: bench Markus!
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