On 8/27/2011 1:31 AM, Andrew West wrote:
On 27 August 2011 09:25, Andrew West<[email protected]>  wrote:
On 27 August 2011 03:52, Benjamin M Scarborough
<[email protected]>  wrote:
Are name aliases exempted from the normal character naming conventions? I ask 
because four of the entries have words that begin with numbers.

008E;SINGLE-SHIFT 2;control
008F;SINGLE-SHIFT 3;control
0091;PRIVATE USE 1;control
0092;PRIVATE USE 2;control

ISO 6429 (and consequently ISO/IEC 10646 Section 11) calls these characters:
SINGLE-SHIFT TWO
SINGLE-SHIFT THREE
PRIVATE USE ONE
PRIVATE USE TWO

<http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST/Ecma-048.pdf>

Changing their names to "SINGLE-SHIFT 2" or "SINGLE-SHIFT-2" etc is
surely contrary to the whole point of the exercise.
Sorry, ignore that. I hadn't noticed that the digit forms were in
addition to the forms with numbers written as words.

Actually, you brought something to my attention that I had missed on reading the file, so I won't ignore this.

Having these ill-formatted names *in addition* to essentially the same name, but one that follows the naming conventions strikes me as silly. It would set a potential precedent for adding aliases for any character name containing either a digit or a the name for that digit. The PRI gives no rationale for the inclusion of names "valid in earlier versions".

If there's a known deviation that is currently supported (as named character ID, such as in regular expressions) in widely distributed software, I would support the addition on compatibility grounds (with tweaks that follow the naming rules). But simply because a name existed once (but was later deprecated) strikes me as going into the same "encyclopedic" direction that Ken himself has disavowed.

I do think now that grouping the file is a bad idea, because several people in this discussion, myself included, missed these particular near duplicates. The natural thing is wanting to know all names/aliases for a character. If someone needs grouping for some purposes, a spreadsheet or other tool can easily be used to filter by status field.

I also think that the status field "iso6429" is badly named. It should be "control", and what is named control should be "control-alternate", or perhaps, both of these groups should become simply "control". I think the labels chosen by the data file just set up bad precedents. If 6429, why not a section for 9535 (or whatever the kbd standard is) etc.

A./

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