From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Wed Oct 26 2005 - 17:16:23 CST
At 01:56 +0300 2005-10-27, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
>The proposal might be a bad one, but I think the rationale for
>rejecting it has not been sufficiently explained. How do the
>statements about disrupting everything and invalidating existing
>data follow from
>established use of A to F as hexadecimal digits?
There is no earthly reason to consider this disunification.
>The issue might be important to future discussions, and clarifying
>the situation could help to prevent proposals that have no chances
>of getting approved, or at least have them rejected in a manner that
>better convinces their advocates.
There are no hard and fast rules that will solve all future
disunification problems. Believe me; I am king of disunifications. :-)
>As far as I have understood, the proposal was about adding new
>characters, for use as hexadecimal digits, and normally with shapes
>similar to the letters A through F.
Similar? No. Identical to.
>And unless I'm missing something, the reason would be semantic disambiguation.
The ordinary letters A-F are already used for this purpose with no problem.
>If the (main) reason for rejection was that new characters will not
>be added to Unicode and ISO 10646 just to make semantic distinction,
>when no visual difference (normally) exists, then I think it would
>have been useful to say so.
We did. We identified these as duplicate characters, that is, as
characters already encoded.
>I don't see how the addition of new characters could _invalidate_
>existing data.
Oceans of existing data.
EVERY SINGLE U+xxxx UNICODE REFERENCE.
Come on, Jukka. You know better than to play Devil's advocate on this one.
-- Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com
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