You, Alex Belits, were spotted writing this on Tue, Apr 04, 2000 at 05:34:55PM -0700:
> On Tue, 4 Apr 2000, Alex Belits wrote:
>
> > > You mean, MIME multipart documents are better than Unicode if I, for instance,
> > > want to handle Tolstoy's "War and Peace" with French quotes in the middle of
> > > Russian sentences?
> > >
> > > I don't think so.
> >
> > This is what multipart format exists for -- to combine documents or
> > sections in the document with possibly different metadata in the
> > headers. The idea of "mail attachment" appeared later.
>
> I have to add that I agree that the way, MIME multipart is handled is
> primitive and inconvenient for such applications, however this is not the
> result of any flaw in its design, only of the lack of progress after
> "everything should adopt Unicode" doctrine was declared.
> One may argue
> that the way that TeX handles such a text is even more inconvenient,
> however even now it's most likely that TeX would be used for this kind of
> typesetting.
But we're *not* talking about typesetting -- rather about multilingual
text handling. TeX, indeed, does typesetting and thus solves the wrong
problem. In "real life" someone who needs to handle text with Russian
and French in it -- type it, send it, read it, study it, etc. -- not
*typeset* it -- won't use TeX for it, but will rather walk over to the
Windows machine and fire up Word. This is the solution that's used in
"real life" right now -- and incidentally, one of the reasons it's
become so annoyingly common to email Word files as some kind of
universal text standard. I don't like this, but currently the Unix
world doesn't have a good alternative to offer. UTF-8 changes that,
and I think that's a wonderful thing. It's fine for you to talk about
what would happen if MINE were to evolve into a general-purpose text-marking
standard powerful enough to handle a Czech word inside a French sentence,
but that didn't happen, which means that neither you nor anyone else took
it there. Frankly, I don't think MIME would have been up for the task
anyway, but that's a moot point because it just didn't happen.
--
Anatoly Vorobey,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://pobox.com/~mellon/
"Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly" - G.K.Chesterton
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