From: Peter Constable (petercon@microsoft.com)
Date: Sat Mar 05 2005 - 18:51:45 CST
> From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org]
On
> Behalf Of UList@dfa-mail.com
> People think I'm being absolutely horrible.
Not at all. Some may find you just a bit frustrating, though, because
- you appear to have come here with questions about the Standard without
having attempted to find answers to basic questions by reading the
Standard,
- you appear to have come here declaring what conceptual models should
be used (along with some new terminology), and declaring what the
mandate of Unicode *is*, as though the founding members of the Unicode
Consortium didn't have enough insight to establish what the mandate was
at the outset before they started sinking millions of dollars into the
work of the Consortium, and as though the technical experts who have
worked on the Standard in some cases for 15+ years hadn't figured out
long ago what conceptual models should apply, and
- some of your remarks appear to be trolling.
> But you should be more sympathetic.
Let's make a deal: We'll try to be more sympathetic, and you start
reading the Standard, adopt an approach in which you start off a thread
by saying what problem you're *really* trying to solve (you were never
trying to solve any Serbian problems), asking for thoughts on *that*
problem, and when people push back on a suggestion you might make, show
some willingness to accept that their response just might be
appropriate.
> And I saw that Unicode was
> having
> to answer complex and finely gradated questions with the bluntest of
> answers:
> black or white. Codepoint or not. And it occurred to me that what was
> called
> for conceptually, was one or more shades of gray...
> I brought up an example of this with the Serbian 't'. My approach has
a
> sound conceptual basis...
> But I was told, no, there is simply a better way of doing this:
"language
> tags".
>
> And so I grudgingly accepted this, and moved on from my example given
for
> familiarity -- a local variation of the Cyrillic script -- to an
actual
> interest, obscure but highly comparible local variations of the Greek
> script.
The problem here is that you fail to deal appropriately with the shades
of gray that Unicode has been juggling all along. You used the Serbian
example for reasons of familiarity and got one answer, but then you
assumed in a black-and-white way that that same answer is the one to
apply to anything that looks at all similar. Which is wrong.
It appears that *you* are not adequately allowing for shades of gray.
> I said OK, now show me how "language tags" are going to apply to this,
to
> get
> the glyphs needed for these Greek script variants to display. And
after a
> very
> long frustrating process of non-answers, the dirty little truth came
out.
> "Language tags" are a fib.
Not at all! They're just not the answer to every little glyph variant
someone wants to display.
> The actual answer for the Serbian 't' is: Unicode chooses not to deal
> with
> this, Unicode absolves itself of all responsibility for dealing with
this,
> and
> Unicode absolves itself of all responsibility for following up that it
is
> dealt with elsewhere -- and incidentally there might be some technical
way,
> someday, outside of Unicode, to do something as insignificant as
actually
> displaying that glyph, by means of a standardized language tag.
Unicode chooses not to deal with it because it was, and always has been,
out of scope for the Unicode Standard. It does not need to absolve
itself of responsibility for this since it was never part of Unicode's
mandate. That's all I'll say to this troll.
Peter Constable
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