Mark Davis <markdavis@ispchannel.com> wrote:
> The best way I find to think of UCS-2 at this point is *not*
> (𝑛𝑜𝑡) another encoding, but rather simply a
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> shorthand for a particular supported subset of UTF-16. In that way, it
> is like other subsets: for example, I can talk about the Cyrillic-
> block repertoire in UTF-16.
<soapbox>
I thought this usage was a bad idea for at least two reasons:
1) We are always told not to use code points that haven't been formally
assigned (that's why I couldn't get anyone to give me a "sneak
preview" of characters coming in 3.0.1). I had no idea what was in
the U+1D4xx region, so I had to buzz over to Michael Everson's
"Roadmap" pages to find out.
2) What I found out was that they are "Mathematical Alphanumeric
Symbols," presumably italicized versions of the ASCII letters "NOT",
and I thought the use of these things as stylized ASCII text (as
opposed to math symbols) was going to be *highly* discouraged --
that's why we won't be seeing bold, italic, bold-italic, underlined,
etc. copies of the entire Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew,
Han, etc. scripts.
I'm probably taking this a bit too seriously, but I remember a big,
heated debate about encoding these characters in which some high Unicode
guru assured us they were not intended for the use to which Mark just
put them.
</soapbox>
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:21:06 EDT