From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Thu Jan 17 2008 - 04:11:47 CST
At 18:47 -0800 2008-01-16, Kenneth Whistler wrote:
> > Does it look more convincing now?
>
>Not yet.
>
>You have:
>
>1. <2071, 2070> available in plain text simply to represent the content.
>
>2. <sub>10</sub> available in many markup languages.
>
>And the problem is that neither of those works, in plain text or
>in HTML pages, to get the monospace layout you want for this
>application.
>
>But I'm certainly not convinced that Unicode has to solve the monospace
>layout problem for plain text.
I think he's making a pretty reasonable case, given the fat that we
do support legacy encodings of other parts of the world, and that he
actually wants to use the character in his data.
>The thing that would be convincing for me, personally (although I
>don't speak for everybody on this list, obvious), is if I felt
>there was an interoperability issue for working with the GOST 10859
>standard that required introduction of a compatibility character
>for one-to-one mapping. But it is hard to make such an interoperability
>argument for essentially dead encodings. It is much easier to
>make the case for widespread encodings that everybody has to
>implement, like GB 18030, which has various thingums in it that
>would otherwise not likely have been encoded in Unicode.
Soviet data is a pretty big pile of cheese, though.
>Now granted that case isn't as intractable as what you are
>dealing with, because it doesn't involve inability to line
>up columns in monospace printout.
>
>But I think it illustrates another instance of appropriate
>skepticism at this point about simply encoding compatibility
>characters in Unicode for every character in every obscure
>historic character encoding that people dig up.
I prefer to err on the side of generosity. GOST isn't all that "obscure".
>I think you would need to answer that skepticism to get the
>UTC on your side for encoding a subscript 10 as a single
>character.
How does one "answer" scepticism?
>On the other hand, there is so much compatibility dreck in
>the standard already, maybe nobody would even notice. ;-)
Quite so.
-- Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com
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