From: Asmus Freytag (asmusf@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Tue Dec 11 2007 - 15:39:04 CST
On 12/11/2007 9:34 AM, Andreas Stötzner wrote:
> And: “Just names” and “just glyphs” – you only make it obscure that way.
>
It's been a long established principle of the Unicode Standard (and
10646!) to freeze names of characters, once adopted. That makes them
different from other types of named entities; for one, many names have
known defects that prevent them from being reasonable description of
their associated characters. Therefore, if you need an accurate
description of a character, in the general case, you need to use an
_alias_, not a formal character name.
It's been an equally established principle that characters can be
represented by a range of glyphs, where the range depends on the
character. What gets depicted in the formal document tries to be both
typical and neutral (avoiding idiosyncratic design choices). Finally,
where appropriate, a serifed, specifically times-like font is used to
show more details and cut down on accidental confusibility between
representative glyphs for different characters.
The goal with the glyphs is to be an aid in identifying the character in
question, in a list(!), without accidentally suggesting some feature not
normally found in actual font designs for it.
It's a total non-goal to make the glyph a realization of the (possibly
faulty) description embodied in a character name. In fact, changing the
glyph in this instance could be construed as casting doubts on the
fundamental identity of the character as being the IPA character in this
case.
Character coding stability requires that everything be done to maintain
the *identity* of what is coded at a given position. The committees must
be constantly vigilant against "creeping reinterpretation" of existing
characters.
Yes, following these principles does lead to the need for additional
explanation (including the use of character name aliases), but
realistically, there's no alternative. So pretending that they don't
apply is not helpful, to say the least.
I would have thought, that, as a member of the German committee, you
were firmly subscribed to these long-standing principles of the
character encoding work.
A./
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