From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Fri Jan 25 2008 - 12:52:43 CST
David Sewell asked:
> Is there a reason why the "Characters Under Investigation" table is so
> out of date?
>
> http://www.unicode.org/alloc/investigation.html
Yes.
The Pipeline table:
http://www.unicode.org/alloc/Pipeline.html
and the Characters Under Investigation table and the Rejected
Characters table were created some years ago by the UTC
as a means of keeping track of the status of decisions about
the acceptance or rejection of various characters, where the
decisions were in process and not yet part of a released
version of the standard.
The Pipeline table itself has proven crucial to tracking
that process, and has been scrupulously updated after
every UTC and every WG2 meeting for some time now.
The Rejected Characters table has been treated as a historical
summary of some proposals that were rejected outright,
but not all characters rejected for encoding end up in it --
only the ones for which the UTC goes on record as wanting
to note the decision in that table. So it is less complete --
and for a good reason, as many of the characters rejected
are only in process themselves, and may come back around
in revised proposals whose disposition is different.
The long history of the Malayalam chillu characters is a
case in point.
The Characters Under Investigation table, on the other hand,
has been an orphan for some time now. It was originally
conceived of as a place to note problematical proposed
characters which had neither been accepted nor outright
rejected, and for which the UTC decision had been to
investigate these further until sufficient information is
forthcoming to make a decision.
The problem is that such a function has largely been
overtaken now by the much more robust Public Review
Issue process:
http://www.unicode.org/review/
which is actively maintained and is a part of every UTC
meeting process now.
Some UTC members have noted the vestigial function and out-of-date
nature of the content of the Characters Under Investigation
and Rejected Characters table, so there is some chance that
in the future those pages will be modified or retired. But
decisions about what goes onto those pages depends in large
part on the UTC deciding to do something specific about them.
--Ken
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