From: Ernest Cline (ernestcline@mindspring.com)
Date: Fri Apr 30 2004 - 19:42:40 EDT
> [Original Message]
> From: Kenneth Whistler <kenw@sybase.com>
>
> On the other hand, I could not expect any software doing
> Unicode normalization to pay any attention to *my* interpretation
> of those equivalences, and if I really wanted to process data
> using such equivalences, it would be up to me to write the
> software to do so.
Decompositions and canonical combining classes are the
two things that affect normalization, and are why Unicode
limits changes to these two to be made only in an upwardly
compatible manner. This is what makes assigning those
properties to private use characters so tricky. Variation
selectors give us a way out of part of the problem. Variation
selectors can replace of single character decompositions
(either canonical or compatibility). Private variation selectors
could open up such an ability for private use. Providing
private use characters with a default ccc other than 0 would
open combining classes for private use in a manner that
could be consistently normalized regardless of whether
the implementation was a party to the private use or not.
That still leaves multiple character decompositions as
a difficulty for private use, but except as they might be
used for internal use to compact data storage, they are
generally unnecessary, so the lack of any good way to
generalize them doesn't bother me at all.
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