Friday 14 February 2003 is the stated closing date for responses to the Public Review of the issue of whether to deprecate plane 14 tags.
I am writing to enquire if the solution to mark the tags as deprecated within the file PropList.txt yet including a wording in the Unicode Specification that whereas the plane 14 tag characters are marked as deprecated within the PropList.txt file that they are not deprecated in the full sense of being deprecated but are in fact classed as "reserved for use with particular protocols ....", would be acceptable to all. In particular, would such a solution be acceptable to Doug Ewell and others as satisfying all of the points made in his paper "In defense of Plane 14 language tags" which was posted in this list on 2 November 2002? If so, I wonder if I might please suggest that people discussing the matter within the Unicode Technical Committee might like to consider Doug's paper in some detail and perhaps consider making reference within the Unicode Specification to some of the ideas which Doug pointed out, such as the potential for using tags for speech synthesis and so on. In addition, if the tags are described as "reserved for use with particular protocols ....", then it would seem reasonable to keep open the possibility to allow other types of tags to be specified in the future if a need arises, as Doug suggests, rather than using plane 14 tags only for languages as at present. It would seem entirely reasonable that the Unicode Technical Committee could possibly at some future meeting define one or more additional types of tag within the unused lower part of plane 14 within the ring-fenced reserved area. William Overington 13 February 2003
