Re: Java char and Unicode 3.0+ (was:Canonical equivalence in rendering: mandatory or recommended?)

From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Thu Oct 16 2003 - 15:40:59 CST


At 23:29 +0200 2003-10-16, Philippe Verdy wrote:

>I would definitely prefer to have a system in which any leakage of private
>uses could be controled under a well-known policy requiring a reservation
>in a publicly accessible registry, like domain names.

Well, you can't. Private Use is Private Use. You cannot restrict it.
You cannot control it. You can, as a private person, guide it, as
John and I do for some scripts in the CSUR. But that isn't standard,
and it isn't going to be. Ever. Guaranteed.

>If one designs an open reservation system in a global registry

Like the CSUR? No, that's closed, because John and I decide what we
let in and what we don't.

>(possibly with small annual fees to maintain this registration in a
>global registry),

Which no one would ever pay.....

>the reservation could be made much more safe.

Not at all.

>In addition, this would not prohibit rapid innovation or usage of
>new characters, and further standardization if needed in the
>Unicode/ISO10646 space, where these characters, now of public
>interest, could be assigned more permanently and without renewal=
>fees, provided that their usage is clearly documented by its author
>and interested groups of users...

Even *I* (who encourage all of you to contribute generously to the
Script Encoding Initiative, which actually *does* manage to get
characters encoded) would not dream of trying to charge money in such
a loony scheme.

>The main reason why those semi-private characters could be standardized
>later is for conservation of documents which could then be transcoded to
>the now safe Unicode/ISO10646 space.

There is no such thing as a semi-private character. There are
standardized characters (which have particular meanings), and there
are private use characters (which are guaranteed to have no meanings
at all).

-- 
Michael Everson * * Everson Typography *  * http://www.evertype.com


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