From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Sun Sep 11 2005 - 02:28:46 CDT
At 22:12 -0700 2005-09-10, Patrick Andries wrote:
>>Um, well, the security issues are your bugaboo,
>>and they are restricted to a narrow range of
>>activity vis à vis the UCS.
>
>Let's not make things too personal.
I was just saying that security is not the primary raison d'être of the UCS.
>You know other people are also concerned and
>disapprove of duplicating similar-looking and
>similar-behaving (viz. havings same Unicode
>properties) combining characters (for instance
>in a script and in the generic combining
>characters).
Yes, and your analysis of N'Ko diacritical marks
was inaccurate. It was based on a faulty analysis
of N'Ko glyph behaviour and a refusal to accept
that the set of diacritical marks was a
self-contained set unrelated in origin, use, or
form to the generic European diacritics, so that
a unification was not in order. You took pains to
try to browbeat the committees into accepting
your rigid interpretation of what "can be used by
any script" meant, using that text as a weapon to
try to make us force an incorrect encoding model
on N'Ko. You pissed off pretty much the *entire*
N'Ko community, and then you wonder why they were
content to let me try to answer you. You
*offended* them. You've ignored *every* attempt
to get you to listen to the facts about the
committees' encoding practice: No text in the
standard specifies that the generic European
diacritic dot above MUST be used every time a dot
combines superficially above. Now the relevant
committees are engaged in a revision of the text
which you misinterpreted in order to clarify the
real criteria used, in order to prevent this kind
of fiasco happening again. Yet your most recent
discussion papers again are authoritarian,
invoking text which you have misinterpreted, and
even saying that when we try to clarify the
procedures we are doing it retroactively to prove
the rightness of our "mistake". The fault was
*your* misinterpretation; if you will listen, you
may learn how things really get done. But at some
point you will have to start listening. And with
regard to the N'Ko community: you owe them an
abject apology.
Please don't skate in here saying "let's not get
personal" and then try to slip in reference to
your agenda as though it were innocent.
-- Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com PS. N'Ko is under no threat from diacritic spoofing because the only diacritics to be allowed in N'Ko IDN will be script-specific. I've worked hard to get a ban on script-mixing within name elements and it looks as though such a ban will be adopted in ICANN recommendations, with permitted exceptions from time to time (like mixing CHK and Hangul).
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