From: Asmus Freytag (asmusf@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Sat Feb 26 2005 - 22:30:26 CST
At 12:50 PM 2/26/2005, Peter Constable wrote:
> > Smart italic Cyrillic fonts swap in the Serbian Glyph if they see VS1.
> > That's its only impact in the entire universe.
Famous last words.
I won't repeat what others have written in response to this extremely rash
statement and the almost comical suggestions of a "single download" or the
"search and replace".
Instead, I would like to point out that one critical requirement that must
be met before anything can be changed in the Unicode standard is a
*realistic* estimate of its impact on
- existing users
- existing data
- existing implementations
- existing protocols
- existing fonts
The addition of any new standardized variation sequence is likely to impact
all of these in a negative way. If the new sequence is suggested for a
common character in ordinary text use in a standard language, where
heretofore no such sequence was used or necessary, the impact is
substantial (others have detailed what these impacts are). Because of that,
there will be cases where Unicode effectively has to continue the use of
the original, existing mechanism to encode certain characters, even if
these original mechanisms may not be ideal.
The result is a form of stability, and stability is a good thing.
Learn to live with it.
A./
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