On 28/04/2004 12:29, Philippe Verdy wrote:
From: "Peter Kirk" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Software developers, or applications, are not supposed to be party to
the agreement between *users*.
Do you say there that software developers are failing to comply with Unicode
rules by refusing to develop systems that allow *users* to make such private
private agreements and use the PUAs effectively as they are legitimately in
right to ask to their software developers?
No, I have not said this. An implementation which doesn't support the PUA at all, or which only supports a few characters defined by itself, is compliant. I might say that an implementation which claims to support the PUA should do so, at least with the defined default properties, independently of any specific agreement between end users.
Interesting point. This would be an argument for the developement (out of Unicode) of some standard technical solutions to exchange these private conventions on PUA usage, including exchange of character properties, etc...
Why not then within fonts -- namely in Opentype tables for fonts built with
these PUA assignments?
Sounds like a good idea to me. But they are useful only if developers choose to implement this mechanism. Unicode cannot and will not oblige them to do so.
If so, a fully Unicode-compliant system should offer ways to allow interchange
of data between parties of these private agreements, and ensure that the PUA
encoding conventions are isolated and kept within the domain of the private
agreement (for example by labelling documents, with tags containing a URI,
either by out of band encoding in rich text formats such as XML or precomposed
PDF files, oe either in band within the encoded text using special tags, in a
way similar to language tags, but currently Unicode has not defined such an area
in plane 14 for other use than just language tags).
Philippe, I would not dare to propose such a mechanism, although it does seem to me to make sense. But again such things, and most of what followed in your posting, are useful only if someone chooses to implement them.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
