Michael Everson (in training as a curmudgeon) harrumpfed ;-) > >The Japanese national body was very clear about this, and was opposed > >to these going into the standard unless such clarifications were made, > >to ensure that these were not intended for plain text interchange > >of furigana (or other similar annotations). > > Well then they oughtn't to have been encoded.
Yes, we agree that hindsight is a wonderful skill. This function would better be served by noncharacter code points, but nobody had quite figured out how to articulate that yet. But even at the time, as the record of the deliberations would show, if we had a more perfect record, the proponents were clear that the "interlinear annotation characters" were to solve an internal anchor point representation problem. Nobody (well, maybe somebody) expected them to serve as a substitute for a general markup mechanism for indication of annotation, and in particular, interlinear annotations. I recall at the time I pointed out that as a linguist I had routinely made use of 4-line interlinear annotation formats, and that this simple anchoring scheme couldn't even begin to represent such complexities in a usable fashion. --Ken
