From: Asmus Freytag (asmusf@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Fri Apr 01 2005 - 03:17:04 CST
Unicode's goal is to be the foundation of modern sofware i18n and related
protocols.
The more this goal is being realized, the more certain aspects of Unicode
are being
de-facto (and lately also officially) constrained in terms of stability.
Character names were one of the first items to be officially subject to a
stability
policy (together with code locations), even though the formal description
of that
policy took some time to make it to the website.
The reason is both that other standards are referring to characters by
name, (and
implementations refer to characters by code), but also because both names
and codes
are *arbitrary*. They are well-chosen to begin with, but tasts could
change, and in
light of many desires to 'improve' there is no other reason than stability
to preserve
what we have, since there's no unique 'best'.
In other words, we could have decided (in the early days) to make names
completely
non-binding. If we had done that, we would be inundated with requests to
'improve'
the naming of characters. If we had allowed such improvements to go forward, we
would now have a mess, in that no-one would be certain what the name of a
character
is. In the early days, the name of the AE ligature was changed from
LIGATURE to LETTER.
A seemingly innocuous change, but invalidating a lot of places in the text
of the standard.
Therefore, the early UTC said "enough" - even before stability became
required for other
reasons.
Currently, we use aliases and other annotations to point out names that
really are
insufficient (such as the one for U+2118), and give alternate names for
many othe characters.
The (eventual) way forward might be a separate effort to define a set of
'use interface'
strings for character names - those may be regional, for example 'slash'
instead of 'solidus'
for the US version. However, this is a lot of work and other issues are
more pressing right
now. But at some time in the future, this could be an issue worth addressing.
In the meantime, I'd like to add on a personal note that I find the kind of
complaints
that take snippets from the FAQ and the 5-line Unicode overwiew and try to
fabricate
contradictions, well I find those kinds of games silly and ridiculous.
If there is a part of our web-site that needs improvement, we always
appreciate feedback,
(via the feedback form) and especially if it's accompanied by careful
suggestion of
possible replacement text. That's constructive criticism.
A./
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