From: D. Starner (shalesller@writeme.com)
Date: Tue Mar 30 2004 - 18:48:06 EST
Rick McGowan <rick@unicode.org> writes:
> It was written that way on purpose.
That's a nice solution that I wish more systems had adopted.
> "Unicode" has never written any platform software, so it
> could hardly have made the PUA "too hard to use".
There's two private use planes. That's more than enough area
to make some of it RTL and some of it combining, and so on for
the major patterns of properties. If you really need 130,000
LTR private use characters, you could still change the
properties, but that's not the common usage pattern.
> For most purposes, 9,999 out of 10,000 users should never have any use
> whatsoever for the PUA.
There's large sections of the standard for which this is true. I'm not
sure there's a person in the world with an actual need to transmit
Gothic text.
> It's
> more to their bottom line to support exotic scripts than to support the
> PUA, which "nobody needs" anyway.
More importantly, Gothic support comes for free with support for combining
and astral characters. At its best, support for exotic scripts and characters
comes for free with support for the basic rules of Unicode. It would be
nice if PUA support was the same, instead of having to provide APIs to
change properties for many basic usages.
> 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.
For one, there's scripts like Klingon and the Tolkien scripts that get
no respect. Also, considering some of the changes and problems with
scripts like Mongolian and Khmer, it'd be nice to have a PUA encoding
with a serious body of texts encoded before committing Unicode to one
particular encoding.
Is the PUA only for "real need"s? Should play scripts be encoded as
ASCII, or should there be some way to get it right, even if only
one person in the world is going to use it?
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