On 8/26/2011 3:13 PM, Philippe Verdy wrote:
Isn't there an intersection between NameAliases.txt proposed in PRI202, and the informational table defined for UTR #25 at http://www.unicode.org/Public/math/revision-12/MathClassEx-12.txt which also lists other name aliases for other standards ?
No.
Couldn't there be a way to merge those lists ?
No, there isn't. They have completely different statuses. NameAliases.txt is a normative part of the versioned UCD and is used as part of the definition of the normative namespace for Unicode character names. MathClassEx.txt is not part of the UCD, has no normative status for the Unicode Standard, and is associated with a UTR whose versioning is not synchronized with the Unicode Standard.
It would have the advantage of suppressing those names from the proposed table for UTR #25 (characters used in Mathematical notations).
Which would be a disadvantage, actually, because it would remove them from the context where they are useful.
In the merged name aliases table, we could as well include :
"we could as well include..." are dangerous words here. Going encyclopedic is *completely* at odds with the normative intention of NameAliases.txt.
- SGML/HTML/XML character entity names (and some standardized synonyms) ? - Postscript names (from AGL), also used in the "name" table of TrueType/OpenType fonts - possibly even their Postscript numeric id's (the 256 first names from the AGL list is not even stored in fonts, where they are bound only by string id). - other names from candidate standards ?
No to all of those.
Do names defined in NameAliases.txt have to be globally unique across all supported standards (each one being assigned a specific value for the new "type" field added in NameAliases.txt ?
They have to be globally unique within the Unicode namespace, which is the whole point.
For me it's just enough that they are unambiguous within the context of the standard where they are looked up to find their UCS codepoints. Not all these names have to be supported simultaneously.
That is a misunderstanding of the current use of the file, as well as of the proposed extension to the file.
As well, the name aliases should support named character sequences for these other standards.
No they should not. --Ken
