From: D. Starner (shalesller@writeme.com)
Date: Thu Dec 18 2003 - 08:02:02 EST
> Or, indeed, why the "proper" name for a character must be in English,
> and spellable in ASCII, instead of, say, Japanese.
Because it's an English character list; limiting the use of the list to
those who know 15 languages wouldn't be of much help. And ASCII, because
once you've restricted it to English, it's not much of a restriction, and
there's few channels where ASCII gets restricted, but many where arbitrary
UTF-8 isn't accepted.
> In fact, I don't even see why a Unicode character /has/ to
> have a "proper name" at all.
Because a great pain of Unicode is the lack of a standard JIS X0218-Unicode
mapping, and part of that reason is the fact that JIS X0218 is a glyph
standard without proper names and definitions of what the characters are.
> ASCII characters never had them.
http://www.itscj.ipsj.or.jp/ISO-IR/006.pdf (ISO 646, USA Version X3.4 - 1968)
certainly seems to have them.
> And, hey -
> the official names for CJK Unified Ideographs Extension A (for example)
> tell me nothing more than the script and codepoint anyway.
And they are the exceptions to the rules.
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