Re: Wrong Way ?

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Henning Glawe <glaweh physik fu-berlin de> writes:

> Hi Folks,
> could it be that the current way of i18n is not the right way to go ?
> The unix-Locale-System causes a that big increase of work in
> software-development..A few thesis to that point:
> -use the locale ONLY to determine the language for messages
> -use complete unicode i/o, i think the work behind that, like Input
> methods, Keyboardmapping, which _should_ map to UNICODE and Text rendering
> should be put into the XServer, so projects like PANGO should be
> _there_...

 - Input is not that simple.

   Languages like Chinese, Japanese, Korean have "input methods" that
   involve dictionary lookups, putting up dialogs on the screen to
   display candidates for conversion of input text into strings,
   and so forth.

 - Output is not that simple.

   When output of text is more than a simple "plop some characters on
   the screen". (And there are many languages which involve complex
   substitution and reordering), then hit detection, selection, cursor
   motion, etc.

Trying to put this all in the server would require an exceedingly
complex protocol. The server is about rendering to the screen
and about low level IO.

> Utopia: programs get UNICODE Text and display it this way, so there would
> be no big problems in multilingual environments.
> Any other way would be just another patch and _not_ a clean concept !
 
You do know, right, that, all input and output in GTK+-2.0 _is_ in
Unicode?

Regards,
                                        Owenp