John Cowan wrote,
> Non-characters aren't encoded, they're reserved either for specific
> purposes or for any desired purpose.
>
If it's a specific purpose, it seems like it should either fall under
"character" or mark-up.
I can understand reserving code points for any desired purpose,
such as control characters or escape sequences. These may well
differ from application to application. Once a meaning like
"INTERLINEAR ANNOTATION ANCHOR" has been assigned to
a code point, any application which chooses to use that code
point for any other purpose would be at fault.
In other words, if these characters are to be "used internally for
Japanese Ruby (furigana), etc.", then they ought to be able to
be used externally, as well.
I understand that having common internal use code points might
be considered handy from an implementer's point of view, but
suggest that such conventions should be shared among implementers
only, and should not be enshrined in a character encoding standard.
> > Is there such a thing as a non-character with a specific semantic
> > meaning?
>
> Why not?
>
Because it seems to be an oxymoron. If it has a specific semantic
meaning, then it should be possible to store and exchange it
without any loss of meaning. In other words, it's a character
and should be so encoded. (Logos and such notwithstanding.)
Best regards,
James Kass.
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