> So Unicode and ISO do not place any restrictions on what can be considered
> to be a "legal" text stream; but, there is a lot of discussion in the
> Unicode manual regarding various encoding issues such as those for the
> Devanagari and Tamil scripts. These discussions explain the "correct" or
> "required" encoding patterns to follow in order to support these rendering
> phenomena. Is that a true statement?
Well, let us consider "iruer9ofoihawetrp9dddf 0-qgj r8y 23gt uba osgf p".
That's a legal steam of ASCII characters. But it's not English. Not all
strings of characters are meaningful in a particular language.
The standards do not prevent one from producing incomprehensible or
meaningless streams of garbage bytes. But because some writing systems are
complex and have rules about how to juxtapose characters to be perceived as
*linguistically* correct, "well-formed", or meaningful, we discuss those
juxtapositions.
Rick
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