From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Wed Mar 11 2009 - 03:43:54 CST
On 11 Mar 2009, at 03:26, Peter Constable wrote:
>> Every character in the standard can be used by everyone, regardless
>> of
>> the origin of the characters.
>
> Michael, that last statement is of course true
>
> At the same time, users cannot redefine characters to suit their own
> purposes, and part of the definition of characters is their behavior
> in implementations. For instance, it would be very unwise of me to
> decide that I could use U+0628 ب as a non-joining character.
For pity's sake, Peter, could you not manage an analogy that actually
fits?
Saying that RABBIT and RAT and DOG are symbols which **can be
legitimately used** to represent Rabbit and Rat and Dog in Chinese
astrology is IN NO WAY similar to redefining the character properties
of an Arabic letter.
> I could do that if I want, but most likely I will be very
> disappointed to find out that behavior in most software
> implementations does not follow my assumptions. The same will be
> true of these characters: the way that they are handled in software
> implementations is most definitely going to be impacted by the
> requirements of the scenarios in which they originated -- Japanese
> telecoms -- and users should not be led to expect anything different.
I would imagine that they would be "handled" by the software in being
transmitted from one place to another as symbols with symbol
properties. I would imagine that the phone companies would use fonts
appropriate to their audience. And I would imagine that font vendors,
large and small, will supply glyphs as they see fit.
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com
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