From: Michael D'Errico (mike-list@pobox.com)
Date: Sat Jan 10 2009 - 23:14:01 CST
Doug Ewell wrote:
> See, this is why people have to stop talking about how evil and
> dangerous the PUA is. Creative minds look for alternatives such as
> "extending" the Unicode architecture beyond plane 16, which is orders of
> magnitude more evil and dangerous.
Well people say if you want to encode non-plain-text things, then you
need to start your own standard. Plain text is a subset of everything
you would want to encode, so it makes sense to include everything from
Unicode in this new standard. Trying to minimize the effort required
to implement a new standard, it also makes sense to utilize the UTF-8
mechanism (without the 17 plane artificial limitation placed on it) to
access the Unicode part as well as the new non-plain-text part. There
is nothing "evil and dangerous" about it, just unfamiliar and untested.
The problem with this is that some programming languages have chosen
to use UTF-16 internally and thus can not access the planes beyond 16,
so this hypothetical new standard is dead on arrival. Unicode will
never need many of the planes it has staked a claim on, but it is
unlikely that any would be relinquished for such a new standard so that
it could function using UTF-16. I'd say that that is more "evil".
Mike
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