Re: Wrong Way ?

[Steve Underwood <steveu coppice org>]

Owen Taylor wrote:
> 
> 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?

It is unlikely an application developer would ever see any actual
benefit from such restructuring, even if it were realistic. Once all the
clever stuff matures in the GUI toolkits it will be of little
consequence to most programmers whether the toolkit or the server
handles all the complexity of language issues. It is a lack of maturity
in the tools, rather than the location where the work is done, which
causes the current hassles. In another year or two most people will
neither know nor care quite where Pango lives. Of course, they will
complain if it is doesn't get their particular language quite right :)

Regards,
Steve