At 09:42 AM 7/26/02 +0100, Martin Kochanski wrote:
>I would argue that the rendering and behaviour of a given Unicode code
>point should *never* change:
Writing systems change, spelling and typographical rules and conventions
change. You can't isolate yourself from those. There's a certain divergence
even at the same time, in how systems and applications (and font) treat
certain characters. Very little divergence for some characters/scripts more
for others.
However, as a general exhortation for Unicode to settle down and not
re-open, or re-visit a lot of decisions, agreed, it would help software
live longer.
The flip side is that it's then not possible to fix mistakes. As the
discussion of ligation has shown, many typographical rules can be not
understood by the committee, even for widely known languages using
long-computerized scripts. Scripts or languages where computer use is still
not widespread will continue to surprise use with edge cases.
Better to discuss changes in properties, than to add a new character each
time there's a defect with an existing one.
A./
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