L2/02-375

From: Asmus Freytag
Subject: Request for public review of reclassification of Hyphens
Date: Oct 24, 2002

The last UTC clarified the use of soft hyphen and made corollary changes
to the interpretation of other hyphen characters.

The proposal for changing the soft hyphen was debated a length on our lists,
and many people in the committee have direct implementation experience with
this character. While the language of its description and some of the formal
properties were revised, the essential function of the Soft Hyphen, as
understood by ordinary users, did not change. In other words correctly
written implementations should show no change in rendering for the same text.

The corollary change to the Armenian Hyphen is potentially much more
troublesome. It is clearly described in the text of Unicode 3.0 as a 'soft
hyphen'. If we want that character to be now treated as a 'regular'
punctuation character, i.e. always visible when in a text stream, that
is a change for which ought to see confirmation via public review.

For both implementations and users this is a much more profound change
than some of the just recently elevated to public review (viz. the dashes).
I therefore request the UTC to initiate a public review of the decision
affecting the Armenian Hyphen. [Note that I am not asking to rescind the
UTC consensus, merely to seek confirmation of it].

If public review turns up that we did have the description of the Armenian
Hyphen wrong, and no-one was using it as a soft hyphen, that would confirm
UTC's position. In that case I would recommend that UTC issue an explicit
erratum, to document that the change is one of correcting the description,
and not one of changing reality. If, on the other hand, we uncover
substantial evidence for use of this character as a soft hyphen analogue
in existing data or implementations, UTC should reconsider its action in
light of the consequences for the stability of the standard.

Public review was created as a process to help us get better information
on such issues beyond the expertise present among the UTC representatives,
and to protect us from uncovering conflicting evidence after publication.
We should use it in this case.

Similar issues may pertain to the Tibetan Tsheg.

A./