240423 - should GB18030 be called Chinese Simplified?

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(Core :: Internationalization: Localization, defect)

Description

[Mitrophan Chin]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7b) Gecko/20040413
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7b) Gecko/20040413


Should GB18030 in the Character Encoding drop down menu be called Chinese
Simplified since it can also support Traditional Chinese, Hong Kong characters
and other minority languages in the PRC?

According to IANA:

    In a nutshell, it is the Chinese version of UTF-8: whereas UTF-8
    maintains compatibility with ASCII, GB18030 maintains compatibility
    with GB2312/GBK and provides full ISO 10646 compatibility.  Part of
    the mapping data is from a lookup table (similar to GBK).  The rest is
    calculated algorithmically.

    The current GB18030 standard specifies the addition of CJK
    Extension A, and ethnic minority languages Mongolian, Tibetan,
    Uyghur (Arabic) and Yi.  Since GB18030 is fully ISO 10646
    compatible, it readily supports CJK Extension B and other
    languages.


Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.Go to View dropdown menu
2.Select Character Encoding
3.Select More 
4.Select East Asian
5.See Chinese Simplified (GB18030)

Actual Results:  
GB18030 is called Chinese Simplified

Expected Results:  
Maybe GB18030 should be called Chinese Unicode, like how IBM called it at
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/u-china.html

More info at http://www.gb18030.net/

Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

I thought that 'simplified' should be understood as 'non-traditional', because
in the 50's the chinese have simplified the shapes of many of the more common
characters in use. See <http://people.w3.org/rishida/scripts/chinese/>

Comment 2

[Mitrophan Chin]

Yes, the PRC have simplified the Chinese, which is supported originally by
GB2312. With the advent of Unicode, the PRC also adopted it but required it to
be backward compatible with GB2312, thus the new standard GB18030. Once a user
use a character  outside the GB2312 range in their web page, it would be covered
by the GB18030, and most likely that character would be a traditional Chinese
character or some dialectical character like Cantonese, which is usually some
variation of a traditional character like those used in Hong Kong.

Example use of GB18030 in a GB2312 web page, would be like a glossary of
Cantonese terms whose links are at the bottom of
http://cs-people.bu.edu/butta1/personal/hkscs 

In LInux, Mozilla would show the GB2312 in one thick bold style font, whereas
those outside the GB2312 are in a thin character font, to easily see the mixture
of the Simplified and other characters.

Comment 3

[Daniel Wang]

although GB18030 is a Chinese version of UTF8, I'd be surprised to see it used
by people other than Chinese, so "Chinese Simplified" is partly correct. Since
the encoding has no alias, I'd suggest
More
  East Asian
    Chinese Simplified (GB 2312)
    :
    Chinese Simplified (GB 18030)
  International
    Unicode (UTF-8)
    :
    GB 18030

Comment 4

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

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Comment 5

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.