Re: Deprecated vs. strongly discouraged?

From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Wed Jul 09 2003 - 00:27:55 EDT

  • Next message: Jony Rosenne: "Re: Yerushala(y)im - or Biblical Hebrew"

    Ted Hopp <ted at newslate dot com> wrote:

    > From the Unicode Glossary:
    >
    > "Deprecated. A coded character whose use is strongly discouraged."
    >
    > From http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode4.0.0/, section on Unicode
    > Character Database:
    >
    > "Deprecated Characters. Two Khmer characters, U+17A3 khmer independent
    > vowel qaq and U+17D3 khmer sign bathamasat, were deprecated. Four
    > others are strongly discouraged."
    >
    > Is it just me, or is the language from the web site confusing? (I
    > know--it's just me. :-))

    No, the language is confusing. "Deprecated" means "strongly discouraged
    in a formal way," but for some reason, Unicode has chosen to insert the
    concept of "informal strong discouragement" between the comparatively
    well-defined "discouraged" and "deprecated."

    This became an issue, for me anyway, early this year during the
    discussions on whether to deprecate the Plane 14 language tags. The
    Unicode Consortium decided not to label these characters with a formal
    "Deprecated" tag, but to continue to refer to them as "strongly
    discouraged." I once thought I understood the difference, but I'm not
    so sure now.

    -Doug Ewell
     Fullerton, California
     http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/

    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 09 2003 - 01:29:19 EDT