[HanoiLUG] VIQR as a standard [ was: Re: news from the Indian Front

[Jean Christophe André]

Nguyen Vu Hung a écrit :
> The point is that you can *read* Unicode or not.
> [...]
> What I am am trying to convert ( you ) is that: make email readable, independent from MTAs.
>   
(Here I'm talking for myself, without my "list-owner" hat.)

My opinion is that we *should* use Unicode at every occasion. I mean, we
still *could* use VIQR, because it is *the* correct way to write in
Vietnamese using ASCII, but *only* when we have no way to use Unicode at
the moment.


I understand that you want to keep compatible with legacy email
softwares, but in doing so you will just make the same "mistake" Intel
or Microsoft had done for more than 20 years, restraining new
technologies market.

Now, after the wars, Vietnam had stand up already. And I think it would
not be a good idea to make it stand at the same place as in 1980, hence
we are almost 30 years later.

Vietnam is relatively new in using computers and Internet broadly. It's
the right time to make every Vietnamese people use the best standards
available. So the Vietnam could make it's first steps in the global
market without fear!


To summarize, let's say « Please help Vietnam beeing a leading country
in modern technologies by just using Unicode whenever you can! ». :-)

And, please, don't be afraid to let America or Europe far behind
Vietnam, just because they can't see their interest in using Unicode! ;-)

> *standard* -> is what not defined yet until this thread is ended. At this point you believe that Unicode should/must be the standard while I am a poor guy trying to defend that VIQR is even better by its readability.
>   
In my opinion, VIQR and Unicode are both very good standards in the fact
they both allow any Vietnamese speaking people to exchange writings in
total respect of the Vietnamese language.

But, the point is, VIQR should only be seen as a *failsafe* solution
where Unicode is not available. And, once again in my opinion, every
Vietnamese people should get Unicode available for the country sake and
to help it move to the global market (because Vietnam already entered in
WTO).

Unicode is available on any platform now. But, sadly, most people won't
take the move if we don't push them to do so. This is why we, let's call
us "technology experts", should all use Unicode to enforce every other
people to make the move!

> You ever used pine 4 on SunOs 4,
Yes I did. And I quickly moved to install most other GNU packages on
these Sun's (it was in 1998) -- Do you know there is pre-compiled
packages available? -- including "mutt" that already began to support
Unicode at this time.

And you should have moved to Solaris for a long time now... But, I know,
it's expensive. Do you now Debian GNU/Linux also runs on these
architectures? ;-)

> or standard 'mail' program under Linux.
Yes I did too. And it has no problem to display Unicode as soon as you
have a Unicode compatible font (say "unifont" for a fixed-size one).
There is solutions for typing too (say "xvnkb") even in console mode
(which can support Vietnamese and Latin-1 at the same time in Unicode
mode) !

> In such situations you neither be able to read nor write Unicode.
>   
To stand correct: in such situation you have some work to do to enable
Unicode compatibility! ;-)


> # David, make a poll on this issue pls. Get me out of this. help :D
>   
A poll will only confirm one or one-another opinion. It won't solve the
problem of people still not using Unicode. These people will only face
more and more problems as the time being, because at the end everybody
will move to Unicode... I hope it's clear for everybody now.


For a short story, I read that Japanese were strongly against Unicode
with the UTF-8 encoding (the actual standard for the web) because it
takes 3 bytes to code any Japanese character although they already have
a lot of coding standards (S-JIS, ISO-2022-JP, EUC-JP, ...) taking only
2 bytes for the same. But there is a lot of way to use the Unicode
charset and you can use UCS-2 (as Microsoft does) or UTF-16 too to store
any Japanese character in 2 bytes.

By the way, note that there also is the UTF-7 encoding which is an
ASCII-compatible encoding of Unicode. And yes it used in real life!
Mostly in email processing: encoding Maildir folders containing accents
or even email header fields.


Well... Now, in modern time, I can hardly see why someone won't use
Unicode except if (s)he really don't want too! ;-)

-- 
Jean Christophe "プログフ" ANDRÉ — http://asie-pacifique.auf.org/
Responsable technique régional
Agence universitaire de la Francophonie (AuF) — Bureau Asie-Pacifique (BAP)
Adresse postale : AUF, 21 Lê Thánh Tông, T.T. Hoàn Kiếm, Hà Nội, Việt Nam
Tél. : +84 4 9331108   Fax : +84 4 8247383   Mobile : +84 91 3248747
⎧ Note personnelle : merci d'éviter de m'envoyer des fichiers PowerPoint  ⎫
⎩ ou Word, voir http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.fr.html ⎭