William spilled another ocean of digital ink. Found bobbing in that ocean was the comment:
> >Roozbeh and I assigned two unencoded characters for Afghanistan to > >the PUA, and we encourage implementors to use them until such time as > >the characters are encoded. > > Yes. ... Now that at least one of them has been approved for > encoding by the Unicode Technical Committee there is now a long period of > waiting during which Private Use Area encoded data can be produced. This > does seem unfortunate and for individual symbols such as these I would hope > that the people who are in charge of Standards might like to consider asking > if the United Nations and the World Trade Organization could perhaps arrange > for some faster way of achieving agreement. *rolls eyes* It seems rather unlikely that getting the United Nations and the World Trade Organization involved in trying to amend JTC1 standards directives would be a recipe for speeding anything up. :-) > It does seem so very slow for > the twenty-first century with so many electronics communications facilities! > Why does legacy data have to build up and resolving the problem take so long > for just a few symbols? Because amending and updating a standard is effectively the same task whether it involves 1 additional character or 181 additional characters. There are a large number of stages, approvals, reviews, and other tasks involved -- which are there for a reason, to ensure the stability and orderly maintenance of the standard. > I would have thought that with a reasonable > infrastructure that those two code points could have been formally added > into regular Unicode and ISO within a couple of weeks. The whole idea of adding a couple code points this week and then a couple more next week, and then another next month, and so on is, well, just nuts. It would destroy effective version control and would create a situation where implementers were unsure just what was in the standard and when it would change further. It would *damage* the standard rather than improve anything. A character encoding standard is not just a laundry-list registration of characters that people happen to notice this week. As such, it is not advisable to create a mechanism whereby new characters are noticed, approved, and "registered" on a weekly basis. > An ocean of digital ink! I like that phrase. As well as producing the oceans, clearly. > That person added that people > have been telling me for a long time that PUA codes are not suitable for > interchange. Not suitable for *public* interchange, because, by definition, in public interchange the receiver will not be a party to whatever *private* agreement defines their usage, and so will not be able to interpret them. > > That puzzles me, because I thought that it was alright to interchange > Private Use Area codes if there is an agreement as to their meaning in a > particular situation. Yes, a *private* agreement for *private* interchange. That, as Michael tried to tell you, is why we call them *private* use characters. > Also, Unicode 3.0 mentions the possibility of > publication of Private Use Area assignments Anyone is free to publish anything they wish, including lists of PUA assignments. > in the section on the Private > Use Area. But the Unicode Consortium will not publish such lists in the Unicode Standard or on its website in any official way. > > So what is the official position please? I just stated it. If you want chapter and verse: "All code points in the blocks of private-use characters in the Unicode Standard are permanently designated for private use--no assignment to a particular, standard set of characters will ever be endorsed or documented by the Unicode Consortium for any of these code points." -- The Unicode Standard, Version 4.0, Section 15.7, "Private-Use Characters", p. 398, 2003 [forthcoming] > This is important to me because I > have been proceeding in the belief that suggesting three Private Use Area > code points for use in interactive television systems is entirely proper and > compliant with Unicode and the ISO standard. It is. But other participants on this email list have been telling you that they are not interested in your *particular* use of private use characters. --Ken