On Sat, Apr 28, 2001 at 11:38:30PM -0700, Asmus Freytag wrote:
> Someone (for example IETF or W3C) who is in the business of defining
> general protocols for text interchange built on top of the Unicode Standard
> would probably want to be very careful about issues relating to the private
> use area. There are three options:
> a) The safest thing is to prohibit the use of the private use area
> altogether - this maximizes the success of any interchange.
Maximizing the success of interchange is not as important as being
able to communicate what you want. If it were, then we should all
use ASCII, because that's about all that will reliably display almost
everywhere.
> b) In the future, there may be a web-scalable way to characterize the
> private use area assignments - in that case they could be built into the
> protocols. The interchange would be definite, but at a considerable cost to
> everyone.
Why? For HTTP, all it would take is a line like
"Content-Unicode-PUA: Klingon; ref=http://www.kli.org/klingon.xml"
where http://www.kli.org/klingon.xml is the definition.
Considering the amount of stuff a web 0 has to support, I don't
see why this would be a 0 cost for anyone. Nothing says lynx
or Opera has to support it, but the heavyweight browser (IE, Mozilla)
wouldn't have any reason not to.
> Therefore, communities that share a well
> defined set of characters are better off if they can be standardized.
Well, duh. From the 0 to this thread, I don't think there's
any evidence that people are using the PUA for standardizable
characters and not working on getting them standardized. There's
apparently two different sets of people using the PUA: people who
are working on getting something standardized and (a) need to use
it now or (b) need to check their implementation, and people using
codes that won't be standardized (logos, conscripts, Han variants).
Telling the latter group they're just out of luck will produce more
character sets and kludges than trying to support them, at least to
the point of not banning all use of the PUA.
-- David Starner - dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org Pointless website: http://dvdeug.dhis.org "I don't care if Bill personally has my name and reads my email and laughs at me. In fact, I'd be rather honored." - Joseph_Greg
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