From: Rick McGowan (rick@unicode.org)
Date: Tue Mar 30 2004 - 16:52:26 EST
D Starner wrote:
> But in practice I don't know of a single
> program that allows you to change the properties of Unicode
> characters without a recompile.
It's been a while since I've programmed with Apple's Cocoa environment,
but when last I looked, it dynamically loaded the property tables at
runtime, so you could change properties on a running system. And at one
time, there was an over-ride mechanism for properties, so you could
actually change properties in a running program. It was written that way on
purpose.
Maybe some Apple person who knows the latest might care to comment on
whether there's any such support.
> I think Unicode made the PUA too hard to use, deliberately or
> through apathy.
Through apathy? "Unicode" has never written any platform software, so it
could hardly have made the PUA "too hard to use". Technical aspects of the
standard are controlled by the UTC. UTC deliberately kept its hands out of
defining how to use the PUA, because that's how the members have voted.
For most purposes, 9,999 out of 10,000 users should never have any use
whatsoever for the PUA. It's a very small minority of people -- mostly
researchers -- who would ever in their lives have a real use for the PUA.
I'm not very surprised that major platforms don't have standard ways of
exchanging PUA information (either internally or cross-platoform). It's
more to their bottom line to support exotic scripts than to support the
PUA, which "nobody needs" anyway. If there is a real need for exchanging
some bunch of symbols, people should be trying to standardize them, not
standardize ways of *not* standardizing them.
As usual, this is all my own opinion and reflects no official statement or
policy.
Rick
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