--On Monday, October 27, 2025 11:14 -0400 Russ Housley
<[email protected]> wrote:
> John:
>
>> Final general comment: there are least two places, possibly more,
>> in the text where "Unicode characters" is used in ways that can be
>> taken as "non-ASCII characters" and not "any characters in the
>> Unicode repertoire". Even if that interpretation is not
>> intended, the phrasing should be avoided. I've identified
>> specific examples below and proposed fixes, but might have missed
>> some (and the advice may be of use for other documents and even
>> the evolving Style Guide). In addition to the ASCII/ non-ASCII
>> issues, there is potential confusion between "Unicode code point"
>> and "Unicode character" (e.g., \u006F\u0336 is a "Unicode
>> character" by most definitions, but two code points). The
>> definition in Section 1.1 ("...characters define in
>> [UnicodeCurrent]") is not helpful in that regard, at least without
>> a very specific pointer to a definition, not a wave of the hand in
>> the direction of the current version of The Unicode Standard (now
>> 13Mb of text in PDF form). I recommend avoiding "Unicode
>> character", at least without a specific definition in a nearby
>> sentence, entirely.
>
> The document has a definition:
>
> The term "Unicode characters" means characters define in
> [UnicodeCurrent].
>
> The summary of recent changes to Unicode says:
>
> Unicode 17.0 adds 4803 characters, for a total of 159,801
> characters. The new additions include 4 new scripts ...
>
> I conclude that "Unicode characters" is expected to be well
> understood term.
Russ,
Of the issues I noticed, that is the least important, so, if you are
convinced it is ok, let it go.
That said, I didn't believe the definition was obvious in the
particular context I mentioned, finding that sentence in the Unicode
17.0 document is not easy unless one is looking for/at the change
list, and there has been confusion about the issue within Unicode
contexts. But, again, I do not feel at all strongly about this.
best,
john
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