Maybe I should have said it the other way first: yuck. I don't want any characters beyond the planes ever. Nor a change in encoding rules.
Addison P. Phillips Director, Globalization Architecture webMethods | Delivering Global Business Visibility 432 Lakeside Drive, Sunnyvale, CA, USA +1 408.962.5487 (office) +1 408.210.3569 (mobile) mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Chair, W3C-I18N-WG, Web Services Task Force http://www.w3.org/International/ws Internationalization is an architecture. It is not a feature. > -----Original Message----- > From: Philippe Verdy [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Thursday, October 16, 2003 4:21 PM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: Re: Beyond 17 planes, was: Java char and Unicode 3.0+ > > > From: "Addison Phillips [wM]" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > > Here's a proposed solution then. I hereby submit it for use on that > > incredibly distant day in which our oracle fails and a new 1 > million code > > point script is added to Unicode (e.g. never). > > > > When all of the planes less than 16 are full and the possibility of > > exhausting code points become actually apparent (but not > before), the UTC > > should reserve a range of code points in plane 16 to serve as > "astral low > > surrogates" and another to serve as "astral high surrogates". UTF-16 can > the > > use a pair of surrogate pairs to address the higher planes thereby > exposed. > > And we won't all have to muck with our implementations to support this > > stuff. > > Too late for plane 16: it's currently assigned to PUAs... > Same thing for plane 15. > > But such extension space is certainly available in the special > (spacial? astral? ;-)) plane 14 ... > > Which could then be reserved for "hyper-surrogates", referencing > codepoints out of the 17 first planes, and assigned in a open > registry for interchangeable semi-private uses, such as corporate > logographs and other visual trademarks (including the famous > Apple logo character in the MacRoman encoding, or the extra > PUAs needed by Microsoft in its OpenType fonts for Office...)
