From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Sat Apr 09 2005 - 12:21:56 CST
On 06/04/2005 03:41, John Hudson wrote:
> Peter Kirk wrote:
>
>> In the light of the discussion about misleading Unicode names for
>> Tamil etc, and the insistence of some that this is not a problem
>> because these names are not supposed to be informative, is what MSKLC
>> does an abuse of the Unicode name list?
>
>
> No, it is not. MSKLC's use of Unicode names is *informative* too. ...
Not "too", for I wrote "these names are *not* supposed to be
informative", emphasis added. At least, this is what we have been told,
and in fact the Unicode character names are known to be misinformative,
to coin a word. And my concern is actually more seriously about MS
Office, which is used by millions of naive end users, that about the
system tool MSKLC which is for use by specialists.
> ... It is a mnemonic aid to confirming which Unicode character you are
> mapping to a particular key state. What would you prefer? That MS
> invent its own character names, confusing users and generating ambiguity?
No, I would prefer that the Unicode consortium provided a proper list of
informative character names. And since they are unable to change the
existing character names, they should deprecate that entire list of
character names as unreliable and effectively replace it with a list of
properly informative character identifiers, whose absolute stability is
not guaranteed.
After all, it is quite possible that a character's name may actually
change - for example, if a country changes the official name of its
currency unit but does not change the symbol, as Ireland did when it
changed the name of its currency from pound to punt.
As a first step towards such a list, Unicode should produce a formal
database of character name corrections, listing the characters whose
names to be used in user interfaces should be different from the formal
character names. And Microsoft and other software companies would then
be able to use a corrected list of names which actually provides valid
information to its end users.
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/
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