> 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.
This neglects the fact that for the Unicode Standard (although not ISO/IEC 10646, for which combining classes and normalization are irrelevant), destabilization of normalization is as serious a business as adding duplicate characters. That is why Mark chimed in earlier with: > Michael, that is like saying "move the bloody character" or "remove > the bloody character". This issue should not be framed as if it were one where character identity is the higher glory, enshrined in the superior standard, so that to "fix" a problem, the lesser standard, the Unicode Standard, should simply relent on its own stability guarantees. Instead, the two standards have synchronized guarantees regarding character identity, but the Unicode Standard has its own scope beyond 10646, and in that realm it must respect its own guarantees of stability, because the users of that standard depend on them. In any case, even with the clarification that there are instances, in Tibetan contractions, of cooccurrence of shabkyu and vowels above on the same consonant stack, I am failing to see how the particular combining class assignment for U+0F74 is creating any serious problem for the representation of such Tibetan data. --Ken
