From: Arcane Jill (arcanejill@ramonsky.com)
Date: Fri Apr 22 2005 - 04:32:32 CST
Otto Stolz wrote:
> Hello Peter Kirk,
>
> you have written:
> > I don't know why there is a need for a
> > second "unique and immutable identifier" in addition to the U+xxxx code
> > point identifier.
>
> Have you ever read Section C.6 of TUS
> <http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode4.0.0/appC.pdf>?
Peter has been on this list for much, much longer than I have, and I suspect
has read TUS many times over and probably backwards as well, so I'm not even
sure why you asked that question. I confess it sounded to me like a reprimand.
It would be a shame if that were so, as I really don't understand why this
thread is getting warm.
I on the other hand, freely confess to /not/ knowing TUS by heart, and I
confess I had not remembered section C.6. So I dutifully followed your link and
re-read it. I'm afraid, my reaction is that I don't see the relevance. Maybe
I'm just missing something, but C.6 seems to me to explain why we /don't/ need
character names any more. It says that ISO 10646 did need them (because it was
the major source of character properties), but that Unicode uses property
tables instead, and so doesn't. It seems to me that C.6 explains how we ended
up with character names, but doesn't really give any compelling reason for
keeping them.
> How could that be made clearer than in TUS, section 16.1?
It could me made clearer in the following way. It could say something like:
"Application developers are STRONGLY DISCOURAGED from displaying these names in
a user-interface". That would help.
You see, the present situation is that applications display these names
willy-nilly, and end-users (who /almost certainly/ won't have read TUS) will
end up assuming these identifiers to be correct. Which is what has happened.
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