[LINK] Dot Asia a good idea?

[Roger Clarke]

Ooh great, a nicely esoteric discussion of the kind we used to have!

At 5:40 -0500 9/10/07, Kim Davies wrote:
>They are the terms 'test' translated in Chinese (represented in
>Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese respectively). There are
>actually eleven such domains:
>
>     .‰‘ »«-  (Arabic)
>     .¬"«?'? (Persian)
>     .¾’ ' (Simplified Chinese)		<<===
>     .ëéé (Traditional Chinese)	<<===
>     .ËÒÔšÚýÌËÂ (Russian)		<<===
>     .»¦Ð„Ë÷Ž (Hindi)
>     .ɬÉÕÉ»É«É Ð (Greek)		<<===
>     .‰×‡†Æ (Korean)
>     .ËÚÒË (Yiddish)			<<===
>     .ÉeÉXÉg (Japanese)			<<===
>     .??????? (Tamil)

Orright youse cogniscenti -


Challenge #1:  how many of you can declare that you saw all of the 
above rendered in the appropriate glyphs??

Eudora works interestingly.

I have HTML switched off, of course.  (Please let's *not* switch that 
particular thread back on!).

But it displayed 6 of the 11 scripts in what appeared to be 
appropriate form - identified above with <<===

When I do a Reply-To, it reverts them to ASCII equivalents.


Challenge #2 - explain in terms that educated mortals can understand 
why they display as they do above, i.e. rendered in 8-bit ASCII.

The one that particularly interests me is the Tamil.

But the alphabetic scripts also surprise me, because they include repeats.

(I'm less surprised by the repeats within the logographic scripts, 
i.e. the 4 East Asian ones.  That's because those 4 use a 16-bit 
space*, which I understood had space left.  Hence, when interpreted 
in 8-bit space, they may have repeating higher-order chars - in the 
case of Japanese, it's what I'd informally describe as 
<capital-e-acute>).


*  *But* I'm mindful of this post:
Date: Tue, 9 Oct 2007 16:39:52 +1000
From: "Christopher Vance" <cjsvance at gmail.com>
>Unicode / ISO10646 is a 21-bit character set.   Not everything Chinese
fits into 16.

That stuffs up the understanding that I thought I'd developed about 
Unicode.  I have to investigate it in a hurry, because one of the 
seminars I'm doing at Uni Hong Kong in the next fortnight is on 
character representation, and if Chris is right, one of my slides is 
w-r-o-n-g.


-- 
Roger Clarke                  http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/

Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd      78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA
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Visiting Professor in Info Science & Eng  Australian National University
Visiting Professor in the eCommerce Program      University of Hong Kong
Visiting Professor in the Cyberspace Law & Policy Centre      Uni of NSW