On 18/11/2003 16:02, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

...

... A conformant application can even display every
character except (say) U+26A0 as a default "not supported" glyph and
still be called conformant. ...

Of course, such apps are not the kind of thing most of us find useful.



Indeed. So, if an application claims to only interpret U+26A0, we might take this as kind of a "warning sign" that the application is fairly useless, eh?



The problem here is surely that the application is conformant even if it doesn't claim or admit to supporting only this one character. It can print on the box "Now Unicode conformant!" and make this a major advertising feature, and no one can do anything about it. Now this is a ridiculous example. But a less ridiculous one is that an application or rendering system can claim to support Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew and/or Arabic scripts according to Unicode when in fact it supports only small subsets (e.g. those required for major modern languages without diacritics), and still be conformant. It becomes very difficult for those of us who need support for ancient and/or minority languages to find conformant software.

--
Peter Kirk
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (work)
http://www.qaya.org/





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