William, hi Although the specific proposal may not have been discussed, there has been much discussion, which generalizes well and then can be specifically applied to this example. There has also been discussion of general principles which apply directly.
1) The need for such rendering mechanisms in plain text interchange has not been shown. 2) Superscript, subscript, combining above, and other forms of identifying placement of characters, are better left to markup or other rendering systems and file formats (and not for a vehicle intended for plain text.) 3) Some of these systems are also established and standardized (either dejure or de facto), so creating new methods in code points is unnecessary, and given the proposed misuse of the PUA (see next point) is at conflict with the goals and architecture of Unicode. 4) The PUA is for private use, and creating general purpose mechanisms and attempting to assign "standard" values for these mechanisms in the PUA, a) conflicts with the purpose of the PUA, (since this is not a private use and prevents others from privately using these codes for other purposes) and b) conflicts with trying to make the new mechanism general purpose, since users of those particular PUA codes have already given them another purpose and cannot then use the general mechanism. 5) Having private rules for normalization would not work well in public global interchange. How could one perform a search on the web, if each page possibly had its own mapping from one set of characters to others? You would never know when a string match occurred. In short, the proposals do not solve existing problems(1,2,3), conflict with the current architecture (4,5), have problems themselves (5) and so are not enticing. There has been much said about these principles already. There is a saying about when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The ability to attach code points with specific functions is also a powerful tool. And although most problems can have solutions utilizing this form, many believe markup and other mechanisms are just as powerful or moreso, and may also be more appropriate for certain situations. I think this is what Stefan is referring to. We need to use the scientific principles of induction and deduction to make the transposition from the specifics of one case to a general form that is usefully applied to the specifics of other cases. Otherwise, we are doomed to repeatedly state what are now accepted as basic principles on this list, over and over, in response to proposals for PUA usage. Consider using or defining markup for some of these solutions, instead of the PUA. By analogy, include some other tools in your repertoire, so that everything does not look like a code point ready to be hammered. Or as Robin would say: "Holy Bat-utility belt Batman!" I hope that helps. I hope the message does not read as being harsh. I intended to just be explanatory. My attempt to be concise and specific, gives this a more pointed tone then I intend I suspect, but please believe it is not intended. tex William Overington wrote: > > Stefan Persson commented on my suggestion as follows. > > >> Well, why not go ahead and decide on two code points within the Private > >Use > >> Area as values for XXXX and XXXY, post them in this list and perhaps that > >> action will lead to that facility becoming available as a facility to > >> document transcribers all around the world. > > > >There have been several messages sent to this list about why this would be > >inappropriate. Just read the answers to some of your recent discussions, > and > >you'll understand what I mean. > > > >Stefan > > > > I wonder if you could please state exactly what you mean as I do not > understand what is the point which you are trying to make. > > As far as I am aware, the particular set of circumstances relating to this > particular topic have not been discussed previously. > > William Overington > > 10 August 2002 -- ------------------------------------------------------------- Tex Texin cell: +1 781 789 1898 mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Xen Master http://www.i18nGuy.com XenCraft http://www.XenCraft.com Making e-Business Work Around the World -------------------------------------------------------------
