Re: Biblical Hebrew (Was: Major Defect in Combining Classes of Tibetan Vowels)

From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Fri Jun 27 2003 - 08:48:42 EDT

  • Next message: John Cowan: "Re: Biblical Hebrew (Was: Major Defect in Combining Classes of Tibetan Vowels)"

    At 07:28 -0400 2003-06-27, John Cowan wrote:
    >Michael Everson scripsit:
    >
    >> Who is it who will kill the Unicode Consortium if UAX #15 were to be
    >> revised? Did it occur to anyone to *ask* about the possible revision
    >> of classes for the dozen or so instances that would be affected?
    >
    >The IETF, for one. IETF is already very wary of Unicode, even
    >though they recognize the practical necessity of using it, but with
    >the existing stability guarantees about normalization, they have
    >managed to swallow it. Stability *even if wrong* is really, really
    >important to protocol people -- just think of all the nonfunctional
    >stubs in the world of *diplomatic* protocol, maintained in the name
    >of not changing anything.

    So, you're saying, no one has asked IETF whether or not they would be
    able to countenance a dozen or so changes for unimplemented things
    like biblical accents.

    >The W3C would also hit the roof if Unicode normalization changed radically.

    I don't think anyone is proposing a *radical* change.

    >Neither party is at all happy with even the four (I think)
    >characters that have already changed, and are already beginning to
    >turn into optimistic pessimists (people who smile brightly, nod
    >their heads, and say happily, "See, things are every bit as bad as I
    >predicted!").

    Well, y'all are gonna have to do something, and adding duplicate
    characters to ISO/IEC 10646 is not going to be well-received, because
    there isn't anything broken in ISO/IEC 10646.

    >Since the use of non-ASCII characters in things like XML and the DNS
    >depends on the good will of these folks, it is very very dangerous
    >to alienate them, and *they do not care* whether the case is a
    >corner case or not -- _stare decisis_ is everything to them, the
    >actual details little or nothing.

    You could explain the problem with these Hebrew accents, and ask them
    to help by accepting a change. Shivering in a cave for fear of the
    monsters outside isn't going to get anyone anywhere. People of good
    will can often come to enlightened consensus.

    >Change the character classes in Unicode 4.1, and they *might* decide to
    >freeze support at, say, Unicode 3.0.

    Or they might understand the problem. People aren't all *that*
    stupid, methinks.

    -- 
    Michael Everson * * Everson Typography *  * http://www.evertype.com
    


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