> This is not an affectation, it is a strong conviction. Doing ongoing > research in 8 or 9 ancient scripts I have always been a strong proponent > of native character set usage; transliteration can be an adjunct, but > never a substitute for serious work.
A noble conviction, but the conclusion that many other people have come to is that the PUA is itself unsuitable for 'serious work'. The Private Use Area is *private*, what you do with it is your own business, and it is not anyone else's business to support anything that you do with it. Personally, I think the PUA is largely useless, causes more problems than it solves, and should be avoided like the plague. I understand that it may appear useful to scholars working on scripts that do not yet have standard encodings, but it is not much more useful than hacking ANSI encoding, and in many respects is less reliable. Native character set usage is definitely the desired goal, but only *standard* native character sets are reliably useful.
John Hudson
