L2/10-043


Title: Suggestions for Restructuring UAX #15 for Unicode 6.0

Author: Ken Whistler

Date:  January 27, 2010

Action: For consideration by the UTC



I have an old action item, 108-A029a, to provide recommendations
on restructuring UAX #15 for clarity. This document is
provided to fulfil that action item.

Although there is a lot of detailed editing work that could
be done to improve the overall clarity and presentation of
the UAX #15 content, what I'm suggesting here is pretty much
simply a restringing and/or coalescing of existing sections
in the document, without much work inside the content of
each section, to reflect the effects of various past decisions
about adding and/or removing pieces of content in the UAX.

What I'm asking for is general consensus that this outline
of section-level restructuring would be a valuable rework
of the existing document, so that the authors can go ahead
and update the existing proposed update for Unicode 6.0.
The UTC would then get another chance at the subsequent
meeting to verify the results before committing to
approval for Unicode 6.0.

Here are the suggested changes, at a high level.

1. Remove the dead sections that are now simply placeholders
   for content that has already been moved elsewhere.
   This would affect Section 10, Decomposition and
   Section 13, Programming Language Identifiers.
   
2. Coalesce the short paragraph-long Section 15,
   Conformance Testing into Section 4, Conformance.
   
3. Coalesce Section 3, Versioning and Stability with
   Section 19, Stability Prior to Unicode 4.1.
   
4. Move the rump definition of the rule R3 Normalization 
   Process for Stabilized Strings into Section 20 Stabilized
   Strings, and then remove the resulting content-free Section 5,
   Specification.
   
5. Move Section 17 Intellectual Property to the end of
   the document and make it an unnumbered section, so it
   becomes backmatter, and isn't smack in the middle of
   specification-related sections.
   
6. Coalesce Section 9, Implementation Notes and
   Section 11, Code Sample.
   
7. Move Section 16 Hangul into Section 3.12, Conjoining
   Jamo Behavior of the core specification (or parts of
   it, and segment out the Java example code as a chunk
   to go into Chapter 5, Implementation Guidelines,
   cross-referenced from Section 3.12). This extensive
   discussion of how to optimize Hangul decomposition,
   together with a sample algorithm for doing Hangul
   character names, doesn't belong in UAX #15.