At 18:26 +0100 2003-06-25, Michael Everson wrote:
You'd like to think so. But "Deprecate TIBETAN THINGY and add TIBETAN THINGY BIS so that we can fix the problem" is utterly ridiculous.
And by that I mean, given the TWO standards Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646, adding duplicate characters is frowned upon, so it should be less preferable than UTC fixing broken classes if they really are broken.
Is breaking existing implementations better? My understanding is that combining classes will not be changed because to do so will break existing normalisation implementations. Ergo, the only way to create a new combining class for a character is to encode a new character and deprecate the old one. I'm not saying I like this, but this is how it has been explained to me with regard to the very clearly erroneous Hebrew mark combining classes which demonstrably break Biblical Hebrew text. In this case, any existing normalisation for Hebrew is already broken -- in the sense of destroying Biblical Hebrew text -- but still the argument from the UTC seems to be that even broken implementations -- broken because the standard is broken -- must not be broken.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC [EMAIL PROTECTED]
If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores,
are labeled New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine,
who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint
Augustine and Stonehenge -- that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism.
- Umberto Eco
