Kenneth Whistler wrote:
Among other things, you have yet to have meet the challenge by Michael
Kaplan to provide a convincing case for their requirement.
end quote
Oh, there was no need. Michael stated his challenge as a "put up, or shut
up" challenge on the matter of stating an actual example of a clash between
two actual existing uses of the private use area. A "put up, or shut up"
challenge relates to someone being ask to justify something that he or she
has stated. As I have not claimed that any such case actually exists at the
present time, then the challenge is null and void and I have no need to
answer it. I did not wish to seem less than diplomatic in my response so I
answered upon the scientific content of the challenge rather than commenting
on its validity as a challenge.
I can seek to provide a convincing case for their requirement. Yet, there
is an additional matter that I need to do as well, for I must also convince
the Unicode Consortium that it has the power to implement private use area
support tags even if the Unicode Consortium were to accept that private use
area support tags were needed. I happen to think that the Unicode
Consortium arguably might have the power to implement private use area
support tags if it chose to do so. Thus far, those who have expressed an
opinion are clear that it does not have that power. This is a different
issue than the issue of submitting a proposal for the system to be
implemented. If the issue of capability to implement were resolved in
favour of the view that the Unicode Consortium does indeed have the
capability to implement private use area support tags in a non-private use
area of the unicode code point space, then the issue of whether to implement
or not to implement and if to implement in what manner to implement would
become a normal Unicode Technical Committee process.
Ken mentions that I had written as follows:
There would be a protocol saying that, in a plain unicode text file, but
not in a rich text file,
end quote
Ken then responded as follows:
This distinction already creates a problem for your proposal. Rich text
contains chunks of plain text, and introducing a bunch of tag characters
and a protocol for using them which have to be kept out of rich text, but
which can be in plain text, creates a filtering and transducement problem.
That would introduce a problem, rather than eliminating a problem.
end quote
I based my idea on the protocols for the language tags of plane 14, where
there are protocols for using the tags in this manner.
William Overington
2 May 2001
