Peter Kirk posted:
It would be much simpler if each such character were clearly labelled in
the code charts etc. DO NOT USE!, and with its glyph presented on a grey
background or in some other way to indicate its special status.
I don't think people should be told so directly to NOT use an official Unicode character unless the character is actually deprecated.
OK, DO NOT USE! is too strong, but something like NOT RECOMMENDED! could be used instead.
Over the years recommendations about particular characters in the standard have sometimes changed and no-one can see all possible uses for characters or all ways that applications might use some of them.
Well, such things need not be frozen from version to version. And a note could read NOT RECOMMENDED except in the case of...
But greying the chart area for deprecated characters and singleton canonical decomposable characters seems to me a good idea.
As to compatibility characters, remember some of them, for example spaces with varying widths, make essential differences in formatting. The standard warns applications not to be hasty in unifyng compatibility characters for presentation.
Well, that's what was puzzling me about the recommendations not to use these characters. In my opinion, there needs to be a clear statement with each character definition (not somewhere in the text not linked to it) of its status in such respects. Is it for compatibility use only? Is it a presentation form not for use in general information interchange? Is it a formatting variant of another character, which should be used if that special formatting is to be indicated although the two might be collated together?
For example, if I want a superscript 2 to indicate "squared" (which someone used on this list recently), am I supposed to use U+00B2, or should I avoid using it and instead use a higher level markup (which implies I need to use HTML e-mail)? Maybe the text tells me somewhere, but it certainly doesn't in the code chart.
If it is not deprecated a character should be usable.
I thought even deprecated ones were supposed to be usable, in that a system should process them correctly.
But some more obivous graphic indication would be nice to more obviously indicate that perhaps a user should think carefully about using that particular encoded character.
Agreed.
Jim Allan
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
