At 10:12 AM 6/20/02 +0100, Avarangal wrote: >Long time ago I raised this matter in this forum. Hope you will go through >filling the proposal forms, etc... > >In addition to your reasons, hex code code points need to be established but >not the character shapes. All languages may not need to use the 0-9 and a-f >shapes. But need to use the same code points.
how do you enter these? Right now, if I want to write a hexadecimal number, I write using my keyboard. In fact *all* keyboards have a way for me to enter 0-9 and A-F or a-f. *No* existing keyboards has mappings to these novel characters. Some systems let me give longer key sequences to designate a unicode character, but that's not very convenient. Therefore, the most likely consequence of adding 16 characters would be that they are *not* being universally used, and possibly only used by a few people or a few applications. The proposal fails to address this migration issue, as well as a number of other issues others have mentioned, such as the issue of confusability caused by similarity to existing characters, compatibility mappings etc. etc. In sum, the downsides of taking such an action would have to be outweighed by other benefits, which themselves need to be clearly established (and not just taken for granted) before the proposal could reasonably be considered. I personally doubt that benefits can be shown to outweigh the substantial negative impacts such a proposal would have, and think very unlikely that they would be so compelling as to warrant encoding on the BMP. But this is all speculation until somebody actually writes the whole thing down - and not just a sketch. A./
