An assessment of the Unicode standard

[Neil Hodgson]

Chris Jones:

> Is the implication that the principal usefulness of such languages as
> Hindi and "other Indian languages" is us selling "things" to them..? 

   Unicode was developed by a group of US corporations: Xerox, Apple,
Sun, Microsoft, ... The main motivation was to avoid dealing with
multiple character set encodings since this was difficult, time
consuming and expensive.

> I
> am not from these climes but all the same, I do find you tone of voice
> rather offensive, considering that you are referring to a culture that's
> about 3000 years older and 3000 richer than ours and certainly deserves
> our respect.

   Eh? Was Unicode developed in India? China? What precisely is
direspectful here? Is there a significant population that regards
Unicode as their 'holy patrimony' that will suffer distress due to my
post?

> Maybe you didn't notice, but our plants shut down many years ago.. They
> are selling _us_ their wares.

   Maybe your plants shut down but some of the plants I have worked at
(such as the steelworks at Port Kembla) are still successfully exporting
to Asia.

   Neil