From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Tue Aug 05 2003 - 20:13:42 EDT
Peter Kirk said:
> From what Ken says, it sounds like it will be wrong from whenever
> Unicode 4.0 is officially issued
Actually Unicode 4.0 was officially issued on April 17, 2003.
What we are waiting on now is for the publication of the text
of the book to catch up to that fact. ;-)
> because this paragraph has been
> excised from that standard. But until then it seems to be correct, SPACE
> is indeed "considered a format character".
Nope. It is incorrect to try to mix and match between versions
of the standard.
In Unicode 3.0 this was an ambiguity in the meaning and usage
of the term "format character", and for Unicode 3.0, we can
all see how people who ran into section 4.5 of the standard
could be a little confused about the status of SPACE.
The actual intent of that offending paragraph was to attempt to
explain the somewhat procrustean nature of the General Category
classes, which may not do justice to the complicated behavior
of some of the characters in Unicode, rather than to explain the
status of SPACE in particular.
> I was misled by Jim's
> reference to the URL of the final draft (as clearly stamped on the first
> page) of 4.0, but since in fact he was quoting from 3.0 what he says can
> hardly be considered obsolete yet.
Actually it can. And that would have been obvious to everyone if
a preview version of Chapter 4 had also been posted.
Once again, I appeal to people to stop trying to second-guess
the text of the standard. The final pdf for the online version
is in preparation even as I write this. The final final
proofs for the book itself have already been produced by
the printer -- all they need to do now is turn on the press
and start the binder.
If everyone would just go off for a week or two on their
August vacation, like they should be, we could all come back
about Labor Day and we wouldn't have to be having these
discussions. ;-)
--Ken
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