RE: Beyond 17 planes, was: Java char and Unicode 3.0+

From: Addison Phillips [wM] (aphillips@webmethods.com)
Date: Thu Oct 16 2003 - 18:11:44 CST

Maybe I should have said it the other way first: yuck. I don't want any
characters beyond the planes ever. Nor a change in encoding rules.

Addison P. Phillips
Director, Globalization Architecture
webMethods | Delivering Global Business Visibility

432 Lakeside Drive, Sunnyvale, CA, USA
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Chair, W3C-I18N-WG, Web Services Task Force
http://www.w3.org/International/ws

Internationalization is an architecture.
It is not a feature.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Philippe Verdy [mailto:verdy_p@wanadoo.fr]
> Sent: Thursday, October 16, 2003 4:21 PM
> To: aphillips@webmethods.com
> Cc: unicode@unicode.org
> Subject: Re: Beyond 17 planes, was: Java char and Unicode 3.0+
>
>
> From: "Addison Phillips [wM]" <aphillips@webmethods.com>
>
> > Here's a proposed solution then. I hereby submit it for use on that
> > incredibly distant day in which our oracle fails and a new 1
> million code
> > point script is added to Unicode (e.g. never).
> >
> > When all of the planes less than 16 are full and the possibility of
> > exhausting code points become actually apparent (but not
> before), the UTC
> > should reserve a range of code points in plane 16 to serve as
> "astral low
> > surrogates" and another to serve as "astral high surrogates". UTF-16 can
> the
> > use a pair of surrogate pairs to address the higher planes thereby
> exposed.
> > And we won't all have to muck with our implementations to support this
> > stuff.
>
> Too late for plane 16: it's currently assigned to PUAs...
> Same thing for plane 15.
>
> But such extension space is certainly available in the special
> (spacial? astral? ;-)) plane 14 ...
>
> Which could then be reserved for "hyper-surrogates", referencing
> codepoints out of the 17 first planes, and assigned in a open
> registry for interchangeable semi-private uses, such as corporate
> logographs and other visual trademarks (including the famous
> Apple logo character in the MacRoman encoding, or the extra
> PUAs needed by Microsoft in its OpenType fonts for Office...)

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