From: "Marion Gunn" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Ar 15:33 +0000 2004/03/18, scríobh Arcane Jill: > >This probably is going to sound like a really dumb question, but ... Is > >the BMP being saved for something? > >... > >Arcane Jill > > There are never any dumb questions, Jill, only dumb answers. > > BMP is part of 10646-speak, and probably part of pre-Unicode terminology.
The BMP is still an implementation barrier for web sites, as long as Microsoft does not update Internet Explorer so that it will recognize FULL UTF-8 and not only one of CESU-8 with pairs of surrogates or numeric character references to display correctly the characters out of the BMP (notably characters in plane 1, because plane 2 is most often accessed through GB18030). For now, using characters in plan 1 with NCRs is definitely not a good solution for the web, and this does not help promoting the adoption of standards related to characters out of the BMP. I consider that the current UTF-8 support in Internet Explorer is the major brake for the adoption of a larger character set that would ease the transition to more resources using fonts made for characters out of the BMP (additionally the current registry settings needed to support some characters out of the BMP, notably for scripts already encoded in Plane 1, is really too complicated for users. IE needs an update for UTF-8 (even if Mozilla is already compliant there). And then we'll see less oppositions to the adoption of a larger character set, whose only major adoption is not performed within Unicode, but with the competing GB18030 encoding.
