On Wednesday, March 14, 2001, at 09:01 AM, John Jenkins wrote:
> In any event, it was a politically impossible decision to make. It was
> extremely difficult to get agreement to add Vertical Extension A to the
> BMP; in the end, that agreement was secured only by promising that no
> future allocations of ideographs would be made in the BMP. It would
> have meant considerable loss of face for the UTC to support such a
> proposition. It was considered more than a little insulting to
> non-Japanese IRG members, as well. *Japan's* characters are important
> enough that they must go in the BMP, but yours aren't. In the end,
> nobody supported it but a couple of Japanese affiliates of Unicode
> members, and not even all of those.
>
At the risk of talking to myself, I think I a bit too glib here. (And
it's been pointed out that some Unicode corporate members *did* support
the recoding of these ideographs, or at the least were amenable to it.)
A bigger consideration than the ones I've mentioned was that having to
rework Extension B to divide it into a BMP portion and a non-BMP portion
would have delayed part 2 of 10646, and that was not acceptable.
Moreover, the Japanese National Body itself did not request the change,
so that there was a lack of strong sponsorship of the recoding and some
serious practical ramifications counting against it.
=====
John H. Jenkins
jenkins@apple.com
jenkins@mac.com
http://homepage.mac.com/jenkins/
>
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