The UTC discussed the need for a generic designator along the lines
of your argument. There was general agreement that a generic designator
would be good for this purpose; howeve, we didn't come to complete
closure on this. What we did agree was a need for the versioned
designator exists due to the incompatibile changes from UC 1.1 to UC 2.0.
The problem with using a generic designator to refer to UC 2.0 is that
one can't be sure it isn't referring to UC 1.0, for which implementations
may very well exist that haven't been upgraded to either 1.1 or 2.0.
As for the difference between 10646 & Unicode, there are particular
assumptions one must make with Unicode to remain conformant that don't
apply to 10646; e.g., the default usage of level 3, the use of the
canonical Unicode equivalence algorithm, the Unicode BIDI algorithm,
the Unicode script shaping rules (not defined by 10646), the Unicode
character semantics, the fact that Unicode doesn't directly make use
of collection identifiers or level designators, etc. Unicode has its
own conformance clause which does not apply to 10646. It is thus
important to maintain the distinction at the level of MIME designation.
G.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:31 EDT