On 5/29/2012 9:34 PM, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
For comparison: The design of the euro sign was published in 1996. It
was added to Unicode in version 2.1 in 1998. As physical money, notes
and coins, the euro was taken into use in 2002. Considerable resources
were spent into the introduction of the euro sign, as part of a very
large process of introducing the euro currency. Now, over ten years
later, the adoption of the euro sign is still incomplete. Informal and
formal texts, printed and online, not to mention receipts and other
documents generated by various systems, “eur”, “EUR”, “e”, “E”, and
simple omission of currency denotation are still very common.
EUR is like using USD for $ - it may be done for other reasons than font
issues.
That aside, while ALL changes to character encoding have a looooong
trail of incompatible support, the fact is that the Euro is correctly
displayed in millions if not billions of documents and websites. And
that this began pretty much immediately across large parts of Europe.
None of this would have been any easier by *waiting* with encoding a
character - or refusal by the character encoding committees to act,
based on some principled objections to the design of the symbol or a
myriad of other specious reasons that some people seem to delight in
raising.
A./
PS: I fully agree with the more large-picture part of your post: adding
a character code merely acts as an enabler - it does not actually
deliver the support. And yes, some people do forget that on occasion.
But this is not one of them.
