From: Kent Karlsson (kentk@cs.chalmers.se)
Date: Thu Sep 04 2003 - 15:24:13 EDT
Jim Allan wrote:
> But the GREATER-THAN and LESS-THAN signs sometimes continue
> to be used
> *by preference* for angle brackets even when angle bracket glyphs are
> available.
>
> For an example, from
> http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode4.0.0/Preface.pdf
> under *Sequences*:
>
> << A sequence of two or more code points may be represented by a
> comma-delimited list, set off by angle brackets. For this
> purpose angle
> brackets consist of U+003C LESS-THAN-SIGN and U+003E
> GREATER-THAN-SIGN.
> Spaces are optional after the comma, and U+ notation for the
> code point
> is also optional—for example, “<U+0061, U+0300>”. >>
>
> The common *deliberate* use of LESS-THAN and GREATER-THAN for angle
> brackets does not require that clones be encoded in Unicode
> for that use.
Of course not. The example you cite, as well as for similar examples,
e.g. XML/SGML (and their "applications"), and many others, < > are
used just BECAUSE they are in ASCII (and invariant in EBCDIC), and
these uses cannot assume that any non-ASCII (and/or, depending
on scope, non-EBCDIC) characters are at all directly representable.
Actually, the example you cite were in draft form using the angle
brackets, though no code points were referenced, but that was
changed for the reason I mention here). The reason is the same
for keeping English formal names of Unicode characters purely
in ASCII repertoire (intersected with the invariant EBCDIC
*repertoire*).
This is not maintained for the formal French names though...
/kent k
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