Kenneth Whistler wrote:
> > Marco Cimarosti wrote:
> > > It has been repeated a lot of times that no more
> precomposed character
> > will
> > > never ever ever ever be added. ...
>
> I trust the clarification from John Cowan helped on this -- there
> is no prohibition against adding characters with *compatibility*
> decomposition mappings, because compatibility decompositions do
> not recompose under normalization.
Yes, sorry for having misused the term "precomposed"; I should have said
"composed".
I did notice that the new character just has a compatibility decomposition:
if it had a canonical composition, I would have posted a formal error report
to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]", rather than just a lazy comment on the Unicode
List.
I am not arguing that that "FAX" poses any technical problem, but rather
what looks like case of disattended policies. People asking why Unicode
doesn't contain a character for symbol <XYZ> are routinely answered that:
"Symbol <XYZ> would not be added as a character because it is just of
sequence of the existing characters <U+xxxx U+yyyy U+zzzz>". After a few
such sound answers, one wonders why this is not also true for <FAX>, <LTD>,
<gal>, or <dm�> (all of them new characters in 4.0).
In a private mail someone called this an HMS-Pinafore-policy, after a song
in a comic opera, "HMS Pinafore", in which the captain of the ship sings
about his exploits and the things that he has never done:
Chorus: "What never?"
Captain: "No, never."
Chorus: "What .... never ....?"
Captain: "Well .... hardly ever."
Shouldn't these lyrics be added somewhere in the FAQ? :-)
_ Marco
