From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Fri Dec 07 2007 - 15:19:11 CST
Peter asked:
> > I'm surprised you'd think that changing the
> > mirroring property of these characters would be a good move.
And Kent responded, for which I must supply a few corrections:
> 1) These characters were relatively recently encoded in Unicode,
False. They date from the original publication of 10646-1:1993
(and Unicode 1.1 as well, of course).
> and there is likely not very many documents using the ornate
> parentheses in a Unicode encoding.
False. Although, of course, it is always possible to quibble
here about what "not very many" actually means.
> Furthermore, they are not
> present in commonly used non-Unicode encodings.
False. This is why HCI explicitly requested they not be
mirrored. They *are* present in the Iranian national standard,
deliberately synched with Unicode for Bidi.
> 6) Of course it would have been better to have gotten this
> "right" early on (and I did give it as a beta 5.0 comment),
Of course. But see my other reply in the thread. This is *deep*
history, and goes back way, way, way before the beta discussion
for Unicode 5.0.
> but mirroring is not fully stabilised, and can be changed.
> In this case I think the positives of a change here still far
> outweigh the negatives (which was VERY much NOT the case for
> quote marks and a mirroring change).
I agree with that assessment for the quote marks, which is
why I opposed changing their mirrored status all along.
But it turns out that there are folks already heavily invested
in the anomalous mirrored status of FD3E/FD3F as well. So
it is basically hopeless trying to pursue any change for
them further.
--Ken
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