At 04:20 PM 5/22/01 +0430, Roozbeh Pournader wrote:
>A question: what is the procedure for deprecating something? Does UTC
>decide on these? Where should I ask for deprecation of a character or
>usage?
In answer to your question:
The UTC will occasionally deprecate characters. This means that the Unicode
Standard will identify the characters and (strongly) recommends that they
not be used for creating *new* text data. However, these characters may
already exist in existing data and implementations may need to handle this
case.
Deprecating characters is different from removing characters. The latter
would leave existing data suddenly non-conformant, which is unacceptable
and therefore forbidden by UTC policies.
If you are aware of characters that have been encoded in error and where
formally deprecating the character is advantageous, you can submit a paper
to UTC explaining the situation and UTC can act on that. However, it's
important to note that many characters exist for narrow purposes, such as
support of historic documents, legacy encodings, or minority usage. Such
characters may appear extraneous but they would likely *not* be deprecated.
A./
