On Thu, 8 Aug 2002, Kenneth Whistler wrote:
> That is true, but for those ligatures as well, the compatibility
> decomposition is not actually useful in implementation.
They help implementations in sorting, searching, comparing, providing
backup rendering when they lack the glyph, reading a text stream aloud,
and things like that, a compatiblity deomposition helps making life
easier. Is there anything special about this character which makes it
different from JALLAJALALOUHOU, for example? We need consistency, at the
minimum.
> Yes, it is for transcoding -- with a Pakistani standard for Urdu.
The same Pakistani standard has a character for "No Vowel". Things that
appear after each letter meaning that they don't carry any vowels! They
have this to help them do *binary* sorting, so they won't need to worry
about the vowels being in the second level of importance. Would you encode
this in Unicode?
Have you read the UZT? It simply proves why you need a cutoff date. To
stop people from encoding things that would make Unicode a mess. UZT
doesn't follow ISO 8859 or Unicode principles. It is the output of a
committee trying to implement democracy rather than technical excellence.
What other kind of committee would have imposed such a "No Vowel"
character to make all various aspects of text processing harder and make
hackish sorting easier?
UZT is there also to make a point: that Urdu computing is different (from
whatever you are thinking about)! National pride, I'll call it.
> Important examples: GBK (later GB18030) in China, and JIS X 0213 in
> Japan. You'll find many characters in Unicode that got there for
> compatibility with those two (recent) standards.
Hear this all you people out there with some power in your national
standards institute? This is the green light! You can thicken your walls
for some more years. Japan and China have been doing this for years, and
Pakistan and Cambodia are also in the ballots. Why not your country? You
only need to insist a little.
Sorry to be so rude. I didn't want to say these this way, but the words
just came out. I'm fighting with this inside my own country, and I've been
successful to stop them from submitting a single insane proposal to UTC
(they wanted to ask UTC to disunify all Persian letters from the Arabic
ones, for example, just because of national pride). It hurts when UTC
surrenders so easily.
roozbeh
-- Roozbeh Pournader | Sometimes I forget to reply to emails. Sharif University of Technology | Some other times I don't find the time. roozbeh <at> sharif <dot> edu | So kindly remind me if it's important, http://sina.sharif.edu/~roozbeh | and use other methods if it's urgent.
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