From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Fri May 30 2003 - 10:57:45 EDT
From: "Carl W. Brown" <cbrown@xnetinc.com>
> > Private Use Areas are by definition not interoperable and clearly
> > not designed to be used on the web.
> > Their use in a page to display text clearly does not qualify, as
> > it requires proprietary fonts to display them.
>
> People use special fonts all the time. They are more efficient to obtain a
> special look and feel. In fact some UTF-8 pages my want to use special
> fonts when they display characters that a user is not likely to have fonts
> installed. For example a travel site may want to display the native names
> of sights. It may use a script that the user does not have a font to cover.
> Even if the user does not read the language they may be able to recognize
> the name.
>
> From one of my sites:
> <!-- /* $WEFT -- Created by: Carl W. Brown (webmaster@xnetinc.com) on
> 2/17/2002 -- */
> @font-face {
> font-family: Papyrus;
> font-style: normal;
> font-weight: normal;
> src: url(PAPYRUS3.eot);
> }
> -->
>
> I think that if you have a Klingon web site that uses UTF-8 and the PUA with
> your own font is very Unicode savvy.
I would just say that this uses the current top technology, but I don't know if the .eot distribution format for the referenced font is widely interoperable for now.
All I can say is that the PUA used in the page are not processable isolately from the XML markup and CSS stylesheet. So the effective encoding in this case is the pair consisting in the PUA codepoint , and the specified font located at a specific URL.
This contrasts a lot with the Unicode codepoints assigned to abstract characters, that are processable out of any contextual stylesheet, font or markup system, where its only semantic is in that case "private use" with no linguistic semantic and no abstract character evidence, and all with the same default character properties (including shamely the bidi properties needed to render and layout the fonted text, because there's no guideline for the allocation of PUA characters).
May be the PUA allocated spaces could be divided in normative categories, for example by assigning LTR or RTL base letters in some areas, diacritics in another large area splitted in 255 subspaces for combining characters, and symbols or ideographs in another large area.
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