Re: Tags and the Private Use Area

From: Asmus Freytag (asmusf@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Tue May 01 2001 - 18:24:38 EDT


At 07:53 PM 5/1/01 +0100, William Overington wrote:
>Asmus continues:
>
>Since such scheme(s) support only some particular
>usage (or set of usages) of the private use area,
>the consortium would no longer be neutral towards
>*any and all* uses of the Private Use Area.
>
>end quote
>
>This is the core sentence of the posting for me. The question is as
>follows.
>
>Does such a scheme support only some particular usage (or set of usages) of
>the private use area?

If you want to discuss set theory here, the set of all usages includes - of
course - all usages that do *not* make use of the extra information that
you are trying to provide in your protocol. (I used the word 'scheme' in my
posting). This set is always larger than the set of all usages that *do*
make use of the scheme.

Since this the latter set can only be a proper subset of the total set,
once the Consortium adds any characters specifically for use in the kind of
protocol that you describe, it would have shown a preference over other
users of the PUA who either don't use any protocol or use a set of PUA
characters for the same purpose using a different protocol not recognized
by the Consortium. In other words:

>Asmus Freytag wrote:
>
>This would violate the neutrality that the Unicode
>Consortium is bound to observe when it comes to
>uses of the Private Use Area. [Since] By encoding characters
>it would implicitly endorse the scheme (or series of
>schemes) designed to use these characters.
>
>end quote

Coulnd't have said it better myself ;-)
A./



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