On 04/24/2001 07:54:23 PM "William Overington" wrote:
>Would use of the sequence U+E880,U+E880,U+E880 help give the receiving
>software a good idea that guidance code points were in use?
>
>It would not be an absolute guarantee, but it would be an unlikely per
>accidens combination to be received otherwise.
You simply have no way of knowing what that's supposed to me. It could be
one of you PUA guidance codes; it could be three Klingon equivalents to
smiley faces (whatever that might be). Since this is the PUA, you can't
make any assumptions about what that means without prior agreement with the
sender. That's true by definition with the PUA.
>I am not suggesting that a piece of software trying to read a plain
unicode
>text document would need to look things up at a registry nor then access
the
>internet. Such a piece of software would just work using a local file.
How do you get that local file? How do you know where to get it, and merely
the fact that your supposed to look for it? That's part of what's involved
in your suggestion of a registry, and my real point is that at some point
you and I have to have a prior agreement.
>I am suggesting that that software author
>would, as part of the software authoring process, seek out, perhaps using
>this list as a starting point, or going straight to a known registry, and
>gather together details of the one or more registries that existed at that
>time...
But I think you're missing the most important point: how does the author
know when his software should do that? Only by private agreement with a
sender, and that requires some kind of metadata or manual intervention; it
can't be part of the text stream itself. Either that, or the software is
only ever used by people that have previously agreed with one another to
always follow these conventions - a private agreement. If such conventions
are useful for you and others that you interact with reguarly, there's
nothing stopping you from going ahead. I wouldn't expect widespread
adoption, however.
- Peter
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Constable
Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International
7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA
Tel: +1 972 708 7485
E-mail: <peter_constable@sil.org>
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