Michael Everson scripsit:
Who is it who will kill the Unicode Consortium if UAX #15 were to be revised? Did it occur to anyone to *ask* about the possible revision of classes for the dozen or so instances that would be affected?
The IETF, for one. IETF is already very wary of Unicode, even though they recognize the practical necessity of using it, but with the existing stability guarantees about normalization, they have managed to swallow it. Stability *even if wrong* is really, really important to protocol people -- just think of all the nonfunctional stubs in the world of *diplomatic* protocol, maintained in the name of not changing anything.
So, you're saying, no one has asked IETF whether or not they would be able to countenance a dozen or so changes for unimplemented things like biblical accents.
The W3C would also hit the roof if Unicode normalization changed radically.
I don't think anyone is proposing a *radical* change.
Neither party is at all happy with even the four (I think) characters that have already changed, and are already beginning to turn into optimistic pessimists (people who smile brightly, nod their heads, and say happily, "See, things are every bit as bad as I predicted!").
Well, y'all are gonna have to do something, and adding duplicate characters to ISO/IEC 10646 is not going to be well-received, because there isn't anything broken in ISO/IEC 10646.
Since the use of non-ASCII characters in things like XML and the DNS depends on the good will of these folks, it is very very dangerous to alienate them, and *they do not care* whether the case is a corner case or not -- _stare decisis_ is everything to them, the actual details little or nothing.
You could explain the problem with these Hebrew accents, and ask them to help by accepting a change. Shivering in a cave for fear of the monsters outside isn't going to get anyone anywhere. People of good will can often come to enlightened consensus.
Change the character classes in Unicode 4.1, and they *might* decide to freeze support at, say, Unicode 3.0.
Or they might understand the problem. People aren't all *that* stupid, methinks.
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Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
