On 08/01/2002 11:38:39 AM Martin Kochanski wrote:
>Google led me to the UTC 84 / L2 181 Minutes, where Motion 84-M6 says of
>not-a-characters:
[snip]
>But - given that it would require a positive effort from a programmer to
>implement any of these restrictions, I think we're pretty safe in assuming
that
>none of it will be enforced in practice, and so using U+FDD0 in online
help or
>web pages ought to be safe. In any case, it wouldn't be catastrophic if
things
>changed one day.
These are VERY unsafe assumptions. You're thinking that these are codes a
programmer some day needs to more or less disable in their code. Quite the
opposite, these are codes that a programmer is specifically allowed to turn
on to mean ANYTHING their little heart desires. They might define one of
them to mean BEGIN DELETION and another to mean END DELETION. If you happen
to stick an instance of the former into your data, I doubt you'll be happy
with the results.
>It also means that I don't have to write any proposals or make committee
>meetings longer than they already are!
What do you think the meetings are for? Proposals aren't last resort things
to be avoided. Quite the opposite. They are the first step in pursuing a
convention that everyone agrees to, which is the only way you can count on
your special character working in someone else's software.
And co-opting not-a-characters that were made such for particular reasons
and using them for completely different reasons, and in particular doing
the very things the standard says not to do, viz.
- they are not to be publicly transmitted
is a sure way to create problems for you, and perhaps for others. Using one
of these is probably the worst decision you could make.
>[Unless Asmus Freytag, who proposed motion 84-M7 that made FDD0-FDEF
>not-a-characters has anything to add about the safety of using one of
these
>characters in this way?]
The safety of using these has nothing to do with Asmus in particular.
You've been warned!
- Peter
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Constable
Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International
7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA
Tel: +1 972 708 7485
E-mail: <peter_constable@sil.org>
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