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

From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Fri Jun 27 2003 - 12:01:49 EDT

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

    On Friday, June 27, 2003 5:05 PM, Michael Everson <everson@evertype.com> wrote:

    > At 10:40 -0400 2003-06-27, John Cowan wrote:
    > > Karljürgen Feuerherm scripsit:
    > >
    > > > 1. Everyone is more or less agreed that the present combining
    > > > class rules as they apply to BH contain mistakes. The clearly
    > > > preferential way to deal with mistakes in any
    > > > technological/computing software environment is to FIX them.
    > >
    > > Not so. Sometimes stability is more important than correctness.
    >
    > And sometimes not, then. What four characters have been corrected so
    > far? Were they "important" characters to some company? Are there no
    > Christians or Jews in the IETF who might care about a problem like
    > this, where a simple solution might be effected? Particularly if it
    > involves only a handful of characters, and the precedent for making
    > such corrections has been set? Or is our standard, which as I have
    > said many times, will be used for CENTURIES, going to be hobbled by
    > silliness like this forever? Hm?

    So this change must be done by proposing several alternatives to correct
    it, with a formal approval process with those with which Unicode made
    a promise: the IETF, and the W3C XML committee, or the SGML
    group and you should give them enough time to consult their members.

    I do think that the IETF will be quite open: after all its impact is limited
    in a few domains like IRI and IDNA which is still not used for domain
    names assigned to registrants, at least not for the Biblic Hebrew
    language. The experimentations at ICANN and IANA for IRI are still
    not closed and they have still not approved all the ISO10646 repertoire
    for all supported languages...

    From the acceptable solutions, ISO10646 will certainly follow the decision
    of the XML committee for practical reasons: the intent of ISO is to facilitate
    the implementation of a coherent repertoire, not to brake implementers in
    their developments.

    This requires an official poll to solve this problem, and Unicode will not
    be able to decide alone...



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