Was Unicode Inevitable ?
@gaditb what if i say ISO/IEC 10646 was inevitable but not Unicode
@u2764 You could put that in either Yes or Other depending on what you most think would reflrct how other people will interpret the options.
I think what I was thinking of counted that still in "Yes".
What difference are you emphasizing here? The combing-glyphs & layout+direction+etc. stuff?
@gaditb well, i think that the ISO would have standardized a universal character set. but the universal character set they standardized did not have to be Unicode. (they actually standardized something different initially, and software companies revolted because they found it too complex.)
Unicode is a nonprofit consortium which grew out of the American tech space and was attuned to the needs and desires of American tech companies (Apple, Xerox, Sun Microsystems, Plan 9). i think it is possible to imagine a world with more international collaboration (and, possibly, better standardization processes) where the question of how to handle text digitally across international boundaries was not effectively ceded entirely to American tech to resolve.
but i think if there wasn’t Unicode, there would have been something else in its place trying to solve the same (or very similar) problems. and there would definitely have been some form of ISO‐standardized Universal Character Set as a result.
@gaditb i guess what i am saying here is that the processes do matter and Unicode is a product of its processes as much as it is the problem space. i can imagine different processes but i think a solution of some sort was inevitable
@u2764 @kepstin @Satsuma I think you're all at the same position, that SOME shared encoding-space allowing plain-text files across lamguages to be written and intrrpreted via a single encoding standard,
and a single stream of bytes in that encoding standard to represent a sequence of characters in multiple distinct languages*,
with nontrivial subsets of that bytestream, out of contexr, being unambiguous about what characters in what languages* they represent.
(* or, well, "scripts", or... coherent-linguistic-groupings.)
?
@gaditb @kepstin @u2764 yeah i mean, i think the whole CJK unification deal was a weird and highly context specific choice that very likely would not have been made in an AU where, say, japan was the premier voice in alt unicode but they still would have run into mojibake or similar rendering issues, along with the need for consistent encoding of a string of characters across document types to facilitate fulltext search
@Satsuma @gaditb @u2764 I'm not clear on what happened, but han unification was driven primarily by the desire to have the universal encoding fit into 16 bits and seems to have been based primarily on rules developed for the JIS encoding standards in Japan (tho other Japanese organizations were clearly against han unification)
https://web.archive.org/web/20090627072117/http://www.jbrowse.com/text/unij.html is some interesting English language reading on the development of character encodings in Japan.