> On Wed, 5 Apr 2000, G. Adam Stanislav wrote:
>
> > > Lack of extensibility and variants. Don't they just love the great
> > >extensibility means aka non-standardized and non-standardizable "private
> > >use area" that defeats the whole idea of having a standard charset?
> >
> > Absurd! The private use area is for application specific usage.
> > Suppose you want to design a database of cleaning supplies. You create
> > a font for the use with your application, which will draw soap, mop,
> > towel, and things like that. These are not in Unicode, and your odds
> > of convincing the Consortium to include them are slim. So, your
> > application will assign points within the private use are to soap,
> > mop, towel, etc.
>
> This is what it was intended for, however this is not how it is used. I
> understand why Unicode Consortium is unlikely to include Klingon alphabet
> into "blessed" by them charset, however the use of private area for
> Klingon is hardly application-specific. When instead of fictional (even
> though relatively well-known) charset the question is about the
> representation of "obscure" or even hypothetic details of some real-world
> charset, things become much more hairy. Labeling of charsets and languages
> in multiple-charsets environment (even if in the case of Klingon the
> "charset" is Unicode with something added in the private area) can
> eliminate ambigiuty without involving ISO, Unicode consortium, etc. and
> without destabilizing "standards" by constant changes.
Can it? People have been begging ISO to standarise 8 bit charsets for ages.
If you tried to exchange information in polish in the pre-8859 days, you'd
know why (about five radically different charsets in common use) Besides, if
the alphabet for information interchange doesn't deserve standarising, I don't
know what does.
Pat.
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Patryk Zadarnowski University of New South Wales
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> School of Computer Science and Engineering
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