Roozbeh asked...
> Would you please give me the reference? I once heard this, but after
> seeing a new proposal for "Arabic Tail Fragment" approved by UTC to be
> encoded in "Arabic Presentation Forms-B" block (SC2/WG2 document N2322), I
> thought I was wrong.
That proposal and this follow-on proposal for the Rial sign show clearly
why it's not smart of UTC to keep letting camels' noses into the tent!
At one time, the cutoff for characters getting into the standard merely
because of compatibility with older, existing, or legacy standards was
about 1991. The date for "legacy" keeps moving forward, and now we see
that we're having to add more questionable characters for standards that
are ever newer. When will this stop?
If memory serves me, Unicode and 10646 were already well established at
the time both this standard and the IBM standards containing "tail
fragment" were created (one of the code pages shown in the proposal even
has a Euro sign in it!). At least one of the IBM pages could have been
created without this tail fragment, and they work around it already in
Unicode
interchanges. The Iraninan standards could likewise have been created
without the "rial" ligature.
My point is that we should really stop adding stuff like this, and people
who know better should stop asking for these questionable characters. And
of course, people should stop making an endless supply of new local
codesets, etc... It appears that all a member company or country has to do
to get whatever they want into Unicode/10646 is make up a new national or
corporate standard with their thing, wait a year for it to become a
"legacy", and then ask for it.
Just my opinion. Other than that rant, it's probably reasonable to add
the Rial sign ligature, in amongst all the other compatibility stuff in
Arabic.
Rick
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Jul 06 2001 - 00:17:15 EDT