>William Overington wrote:
>
> > However, there is something that I feel that the Unicode
> > Consortium could do, if it so wished, without violating
> > that rule. I suggest that the Consortium could,
> > if it so chooses, encode one or more regular unicode
> > characters together with a protocol so that an author of
> > a file of unicode plain text that uses any of the codes of
> > the PUA could, if and only if that author
> > chooses to so state, state in a file of plain unicode text
> > what meaning the author of that file places upon any
> > PUA characters that the author uses.
This would violate the neutrality that the Unicode
Consortium is bound to observe when it comes to
uses of the Private Use Area. By encoding characters
it would implicitly endorse the scheme (or series of
schemes) designed to use these characters.
Since such scheme(s) support only some particular
usage (or set of usages) of the private use area,
the consortium would no longer be neutral towards
*any and all* uses of the Private Use Area.
Going further and outlining a protocol for such a
thing is even worse - if done by the Unicode Consortium.
However, it would be fine for any other organization
to define the protocol - but that organization could
not assign any special non-private characters.
I do believe we are going in circles here, and
lengthy ones to boot.
A./
