Dean Snyder wrote:
>I propose that 10646 reserve the 32nd bit as a flag bit
signifying text versus meta-text...
Welcome to the list!
I think this is an interesting proposal. I've thought there
would be definite advantages to being able to clearly
disambiguate text and meta-text directly in the encoding.
I see a serious problem in your proposal, though: it works only
for UCS-4 (assuming a redefinition to support bit 31 = 1). Most
people are likely to work with text stored as some variant of
UTF-16 or as UTF-8. UTF-16 has no way to represent characters
above x7FFFFFFF; neither does UTF-8, at least as supported by
Unicode (I haven't seen ISO's specs on UTF-8). So, while your
suggestion may have some merit in terms of the benefits it
would achieve, it has a serious limitation in that there is no
way to incorporate it into the way most people will actually
implement the standard.
I don't want to keep you from looking for solutions to achieve
the benefits you desire. (And I dearly hope this negative
feedback on your first foray onto this list doesn't turn you
off from further interaction.) I'm just not sure this solution
would work.
Peter
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:51 EDT