From: Jony Rosenne (rosennej@qsm.co.il)
Date: Wed Mar 31 2004 - 16:14:47 EST
The NBSP issue was extensively discussed a couple of years ago, I don't
remember in which list. In short, it was wrongly used by early web users as
a fixed width space, and there is such a vast legacy it cannot be changed.
However, there are other applications that use the intended meaning - see
ISO 8859.
Jony
> -----Original Message-----
> From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org
> [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org] On Behalf Of Peter Kirk
> Sent: Wednesday, March 31, 2004 10:13 PM
> To: Kenneth Whistler
> Cc: unicode@unicode.org
> Subject: Re: Fixed Width Spaces (was: Printing and Displaying
> DependentVowels)
>
>
> On 31/03/2004 11:57, Kenneth Whistler wrote:
>
> >>... To most people, a space is a space. To rather more, there
> >>is a second kind of space which they expect to be
> non-breaking and often
> >>also expect to be fixed width. (Those who had the latter
> expectation
> >>have had a nasty surprise today because with the release of
> 4.0.1 NBSP
> >>is suddenly no longer fixed width.)
> >>
> >>
> > ^^^^^^^^
> >
> >Hardly. It has *always* been the intent and understanding of the UTC
> >that NBSP was comparable in all ways to a SPACE character,
> except for
> >disallowing line break opportunities.
> >
> >...
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> Thanks for the clarification. I should say that the behaviour of NBSP
> suddenly reverted to what it had been in previous versions of the
> standard, although a perhaps inadvertant change was made in 4.0.0.
>
> Nevertheless, there does seem to be a widespread
> misunderstanding that
> NBSP is intended to be fixed width, and in many systems it is
> implemented as such. Perhaps there is a need to clarify this further,
> perhaps by reinstating text similar to what was in Unicode 3.0.
>
> I take your point about the advantages of having the drafters of the
> standard available to explain parts of the standard which are
> unclear. I
> certainly wish we could do that with other texts that you
> allude to. But
> there must also be controls here. If the text says "black", we can't
> have the drafters saying that the text really means "white". They can
> say that they made a mistake, and correct it in a new
> version, but there
> are limits on how far they can reinterpret even a text which
> they wrote
> themselves.
>
> --
> Peter Kirk
> peter@qaya.org (personal)
> peterkirk@qaya.org (work)
> http://www.qaya.org/
>
>
>
>
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