From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Wed Apr 28 2004 - 16:38:54 EDT
On 28/04/2004 12:29, Philippe Verdy wrote:
>From: "Peter Kirk" <peterkirk@qaya.org>
>
>
>>Software developers, or applications, are not supposed to be party to
>>the agreement between *users*.
>>
>>
>
>Do you say there that software developers are failing to comply with Unicode
>rules by refusing to develop systems that allow *users* to make such private
>private agreements and use the PUAs effectively as they are legitimately in
>right to ask to their software developers?
>
>
No, I have not said this. An implementation which doesn't support the
PUA at all, or which only supports a few characters defined by itself,
is compliant. I might say that an implementation which claims to support
the PUA should do so, at least with the defined default properties,
independently of any specific agreement between end users.
>Interesting point. This would be an argument for the developement (out of
>Unicode) of some standard technical solutions to exchange these private
>conventions on PUA usage, including exchange of character properties, etc...
>
>Why not then within fonts -- namely in Opentype tables for fonts built with
>these PUA assignments?
>
>
Sounds like a good idea to me. But they are useful only if developers
choose to implement this mechanism. Unicode cannot and will not oblige
them to do so.
>If so, a fully Unicode-compliant system should offer ways to allow interchange
>of data between parties of these private agreements, and ensure that the PUA
>encoding conventions are isolated and kept within the domain of the private
>agreement (for example by labelling documents, with tags containing a URI,
>either by out of band encoding in rich text formats such as XML or precomposed
>PDF files, oe either in band within the encoded text using special tags, in a
>way similar to language tags, but currently Unicode has not defined such an area
>in plane 14 for other use than just language tags).
>
>
Philippe, I would not dare to propose such a mechanism, although it does
seem to me to make sense. But again such things, and most of what
followed in your posting, are useful only if someone chooses to
implement them.
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/
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