Unicode 3.1: incomplete tags considered harmless/useful

From: John Cowan (jcowan@reutershealth.com)
Date: Wed Jan 31 2001 - 15:01:47 EST


The section "Dangers of Incomplete Support" in section 13.7 seems to me
to be far too strongly worded; it should be weakened or removed
altogether.

In particular, there is no reason why sequences of tag characters
not beginning with LANGUAGE TAG or CANCEL TAG cannot be used
for various purposes by private agreement. However, as currently
worded, language-tag-interpreting applications SHOULD remove them,
contrary to the usual Unicode view of not-understood content
("leave it alone").

Nor is there any reason why a CANCEL TAG should be required to exist for
every LANGUAGE TAG; in particular, a LANGUAGE TAG at the beginning
of plain text that is meant to apply to the whole text (document,
human-readable-string in protocols, etc.) should be unproblematic.
As currently worded, editors SHOULD not permit such uses.

-- 
There is / one art             || John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>
no more / no less              || http://www.reutershealth.com
to do / all things             || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
with art- / lessness           \\ -- Piet Hein



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