Re: An attempt to focus the PUA discussion [long]

From: Ernest Cline (ernestcline@mindspring.com)
Date: Fri Apr 30 2004 - 19:42:40 EDT

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    > [Original Message]
    > From: Kenneth Whistler <kenw@sybase.com>
    >
    > On the other hand, I could not expect any software doing
    > Unicode normalization to pay any attention to *my* interpretation
    > of those equivalences, and if I really wanted to process data
    > using such equivalences, it would be up to me to write the
    > software to do so.

    Decompositions and canonical combining classes are the
    two things that affect normalization, and are why Unicode
    limits changes to these two to be made only in an upwardly
    compatible manner. This is what makes assigning those
    properties to private use characters so tricky. Variation
    selectors give us a way out of part of the problem. Variation
    selectors can replace of single character decompositions
    (either canonical or compatibility). Private variation selectors
    could open up such an ability for private use. Providing
    private use characters with a default ccc other than 0 would
    open combining classes for private use in a manner that
    could be consistently normalized regardless of whether
    the implementation was a party to the private use or not.
    That still leaves multiple character decompositions as
    a difficulty for private use, but except as they might be
    used for internal use to compact data storage, they are
    generally unnecessary, so the lack of any good way to
    generalize them doesn't bother me at all.



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