From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Wed Nov 13 2002 - 12:20:37 EST
Marco Cimarosti <marco dot cimarosti at essetre dot it> wrote:
>> 2. What extra processing is necessary to ignore Plane 14 tags that
>> wouldn't be necessary to ignore any other Unicode character(s)?
>
> No extra processing would be necessary to ignore Plane 14 tags that
> wouldn't be necessary to ignore any other Unicode characters. But I
> fail to see the point of this question.
The point is to refute the argument that Plane 14 tags cause extra work
for the vast majority of applications that choose to ignore them. If
they are Unicode-conformant, they already have to ignore characters that
they don't understand. Ignoring Plane 14 tags is as easy as ignoring
Cherokee.
>> 3. Is there any method of tagging, anywhere, that is lighter-weight
>> than Plane 14? (Corollary: Is "lightweight" important?)
>
> A lighter-weight method is not having language tagging at all in plain
> text. This is appropriate in two cases:
>
> 3.a) When you don't [need] language tagging.
Then don't use it. I have never suggested that all Unicode text must be
language-tagged.
> 4.b) When language tagging can be provided by a higher level protocol.
Then use the tagging mechanism provided by the higher-level protocol
instead, IF you were going to use the higher-level protocol anyway.
There are lots of cases where HTML functionality duplicates, and
overrides, plain-text functionality; see UTR #20 for numerous examples.
As I mentioned in my paper, even the venerable CR/LF is overridden by
HTML <p> and <br> -- and this is fine. There is no need to deprecate CR
and LF because of this, or to prohibit them in HTML files. The same
should be true of Plane 14.
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Nov 13 2002 - 13:05:04 EST