RE: TR35

From: Peter Constable (petercon@microsoft.com)
Date: Fri May 14 2004 - 08:30:56 CDT

  • Next message: Michael Everson: "Re: An apology (was: Everson-bashing)"

    > I am sorry I had misunderstood the whole discussion then.

    Your sarcasm isn't productive.

     
    > To me, documents encompassed any style of writings (and was broader).
    For
    > exemple, I believed that writing was invented 6 millenaries ago
    precisely
    > for accounting and trading, *not* with the Hamurabi codex or the
    Egyptian
    > hymns. But it appears I was wrong.

    If you get a clay tablet with some type of inventory on it and encode it
    digitally, presumably there are names of things, and numbers, perhaps
    also dates. Let's suppose you encode the text into a digital document.
    You assign a metadata tag indicating that the "language" (linguistic
    variety and writing system) is such-and-such. How would it be useful to
    also assign metadata to indicate what the number format is?

     
    > > If something is going on internal to proprietary software, then
    there
    > > are no rules.
    >
    > I also missed that the difference between language ids and locale ids
    only
    > mattered when used in public documents in published standardized
    formats,
    > and that private formats or any out-of-band tags, persistant or not,
    are
    > irrelevant here.

    If something is internal to your process, who cares but you what is
    happening? You could use 0x0041 to mean "B" and 0x0042 to mean "A";
    that's your business. You can still claim conformance to Unicode as long
    as you do not emit that publicly, or apply those interpretations to
    characters you receive from another source. Same here. The example was a
    software process, and inside that process you could be using "en" to
    mean "mm/dd/yy" date formatting, and if it's only going on internally,
    then that's your business.

     
    > So please ignore my points.
    > Of course when we consider only the legal texts where all months shall
    be
    > in
    > full letters, all quantities spelled twice, one with numbers and the
    > other
    > with letters...

    I can only say this quite misconstrues anything I have said.

    Peter Constable



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