From: "Marco Cimarosti" <marco.cimarosti@essetre.it>
> Probably, plane-14 tags should never have been there. But, once the
chicken
> is dead, the only thing left to do is having chicken for dinner... So why
> not using those tags for more services, provided that there is no disturb
to
> (the majority of) applications that just prefer to ignore them?
I think the biggest problem with such a system is that it encourages people
to use a PUA pseudo-encoding rather than do the work to encode a new script
if it needs to be encoded. It also encourages private use to become more
like semi-private use, and this is the kind of thing that should be rather
vehemently discouraged.
To borrow your metaphor, if the chicken is dead and you have decided by
policy that you are a vegetarian, you obviously have additional options
beyond eating it for dinner. There are enough heavyweights here in the
"vegetarian" corner that it is worth wondering whether one is really on the
side of angels when one chooses to go so far down such a path as to have an
official "registry".
Many folks are paying lip service to Unicode and 10646 will mention (as
Marco did) that "We are only discussing possible ways for doing this private
management in an orderly and organized fashion." but fail to really look at
the reasons behind why neither ISO nor the UTC would be involved in such a
thing. Since this is for *private* use, you should never be shoving abitrary
data to anyone who would ever not be expected to understand it (since they
won't!). The current common uses of the PUA, as mentioned by Ken in his
message:
A. Intentional private use for non-exchanged data, e.g., the
cross-mapping table usage I mentioned above, font-internal
tables, or for various
other kinds of internal markers. (For example, I make use of
three PUA code points in a collation weighting algorithm to
indicate virtual combining marks for secondary weight variation --
but that is explicitly not intended for interchange as characters
outside of the private context.)
B. Groups working on more-or-less experimental encodings of
difficult or historic scripts not yet standardized. The PUA
code points give them a mechanism to try things out and to
interchange data. But in most of these instances, the intent
is not to codify and register some private usage forever; these
efforts are mostly just stepping stones to the eventual
development of *standardized* encodings of the scripts in
question in the Unicode Standard and in 10646.
add to that the third, "ConScript" category:
C. Scripts that will pretty much not ever be encoded, or at least if
they will be it will be quite some time before they are even
considered.
All three seem pretty clear in their intent: you would never be arbitrarily
shoving this data out to people who do not know to receive it by the private
arrangement you have with them. Providing a mechanism (any mechanism) where
suddenly you would be doing such a thing does not seem like a good course of
action to me.
MichKa
Michael Kaplan
Trigeminal Software, Inc.
http://www.trigeminal.com/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Jul 06 2001 - 00:17:16 EDT