From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Mon Apr 18 2005 - 16:09:22 CST
From: "Mark Davis" <mark.davis@jtcsv.com>
> It is pointless to keep asking for the names to be changed, deprecated, or
> replaced. Because of the Unicode stability policy, that simply will not
> happen, as should be clear to you from the many responses on this topic.
It would be a good idea to give a hint about why the standard names cannot
be changed now:
think about Unicode regular expressions that use the "\N{STANDARD UNICODE
CHARACTER NAME}" character specifier. If this name is changed, this may
simply break regular expressions used in applications and locale data that
use this name.
(My opinion is that these regular expressions should better have been
written using "\uNNNN" or "\U000NNNNN" with the hexadecimal codepoint... but
people are often tired to look at the exact codepoint in a charmap...)
So these standard names are made for TECHNICAL use such as regexps. They are
not intended to be displayed to users.
For GUI applications like charmaps or input method editors that allow
searching a character by name, the standard Unicode/ISO/IEC 10646 name is
not the best fit, also because they are not translated to the user
language... For such applications where character names must be exposed to
users, another localizable name list is certainly better.
One question there: which names are displayed by the Windows "CharMap"
accessory? I note that they are not necessarily the standard name, and
Microsoft has tweaked this list in its French version. Has Microsoft created
versions of "Charmap" containing character name lists with other languages
than English and French?
Where do the character names and classification found in the Chinese or
Japanese or Korean IMEs come from? The UniHan database?
I'm quite sure that there already exist somewhere such localized name lists.
Shouldn't they become part of a common standard, even if they are not in the
Unicode or ISO/IEC 10646? Why not sharing this information in a localization
project like the CLDR?
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon Apr 18 2005 - 16:10:42 CST