From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Wed Nov 19 2003 - 13:42:21 EST
On 18/11/2003 16:02, jameskass@att.net wrote:
> ...
>
>>... A conformant application can even display every
>>character except (say) U+26A0 as a default "not supported" glyph and
>>still be called conformant. ...
>>
>>Of course, such apps are not the kind of thing most of us find useful.
>>
>>
>
>Indeed. So, if an application claims to only interpret U+26A0, we
>might take this as kind of a "warning sign" that the application is
>fairly useless, eh?
>
>
>
The problem here is surely that the application is conformant even if it
doesn't claim or admit to supporting only this one character. It can
print on the box "Now Unicode conformant!" and make this a major
advertising feature, and no one can do anything about it. Now this is a
ridiculous example. But a less ridiculous one is that an application or
rendering system can claim to support Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew and/or
Arabic scripts according to Unicode when in fact it supports only small
subsets (e.g. those required for major modern languages without
diacritics), and still be conformant. It becomes very difficult for
those of us who need support for ancient and/or minority languages to
find conformant software.
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/
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