From: Peter Kirk (peter.r.kirk@ntlworld.com)
Date: Mon Aug 18 2003 - 15:12:38 EDT
On 18/08/2003 11:32, Jim Allan wrote:
> Peter Kirk posted:
>
>> It would be much simpler if each such character were clearly labelled in
>> the code charts etc. DO NOT USE!, and with its glyph presented on a grey
>> background or in some other way to indicate its special status.
>
>
> I don't think people should be told so directly to NOT use an official
> Unicode character unless the character is actually deprecated.
OK, DO NOT USE! is too strong, but something like NOT RECOMMENDED! could
be used instead.
>
> Over the years recommendations about particular characters in the
> standard have sometimes changed and no-one can see all possible uses
> for characters or all ways that applications might use some of them.
Well, such things need not be frozen from version to version. And a note
could read NOT RECOMMENDED except in the case of...
>
> But greying the chart area for deprecated characters and singleton
> canonical decomposable characters seems to me a good idea.
>
> As to compatibility characters, remember some of them, for example
> spaces with varying widths, make essential differences in formatting.
> The standard warns applications not to be hasty in unifyng
> compatibility characters for presentation.
Well, that's what was puzzling me about the recommendations not to use
these characters. In my opinion, there needs to be a clear statement
with each character definition (not somewhere in the text not linked to
it) of its status in such respects. Is it for compatibility use only? Is
it a presentation form not for use in general information interchange?
Is it a formatting variant of another character, which should be used if
that special formatting is to be indicated although the two might be
collated together?
For example, if I want a superscript 2 to indicate "squared" (which
someone used on this list recently), am I supposed to use U+00B2, or
should I avoid using it and instead use a higher level markup (which
implies I need to use HTML e-mail)? Maybe the text tells me somewhere,
but it certainly doesn't in the code chart.
>
> If it is not deprecated a character should be usable.
I thought even deprecated ones were supposed to be usable, in that a
system should process them correctly.
>
> But some more obivous graphic indication would be nice to more
> obviously indicate that perhaps a user should think carefully about
> using that particular encoded character.
Agreed.
>
> Jim Allan
>
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/
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