From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Fri Jun 27 2003 - 08:48:42 EDT
At 07:28 -0400 2003-06-27, John Cowan wrote:
>Michael Everson scripsit:
>
>> Who is it who will kill the Unicode Consortium if UAX #15 were to be
>> revised? Did it occur to anyone to *ask* about the possible revision
>> of classes for the dozen or so instances that would be affected?
>
>The IETF, for one. IETF is already very wary of Unicode, even
>though they recognize the practical necessity of using it, but with
>the existing stability guarantees about normalization, they have
>managed to swallow it. Stability *even if wrong* is really, really
>important to protocol people -- just think of all the nonfunctional
>stubs in the world of *diplomatic* protocol, maintained in the name
>of not changing anything.
So, you're saying, no one has asked IETF whether or not they would be
able to countenance a dozen or so changes for unimplemented things
like biblical accents.
>The W3C would also hit the roof if Unicode normalization changed radically.
I don't think anyone is proposing a *radical* change.
>Neither party is at all happy with even the four (I think)
>characters that have already changed, and are already beginning to
>turn into optimistic pessimists (people who smile brightly, nod
>their heads, and say happily, "See, things are every bit as bad as I
>predicted!").
Well, y'all are gonna have to do something, and adding duplicate
characters to ISO/IEC 10646 is not going to be well-received, because
there isn't anything broken in ISO/IEC 10646.
>Since the use of non-ASCII characters in things like XML and the DNS
>depends on the good will of these folks, it is very very dangerous
>to alienate them, and *they do not care* whether the case is a
>corner case or not -- _stare decisis_ is everything to them, the
>actual details little or nothing.
You could explain the problem with these Hebrew accents, and ask them
to help by accepting a change. Shivering in a cave for fear of the
monsters outside isn't going to get anyone anywhere. People of good
will can often come to enlightened consensus.
>Change the character classes in Unicode 4.1, and they *might* decide to
>freeze support at, say, Unicode 3.0.
Or they might understand the problem. People aren't all *that*
stupid, methinks.
-- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
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