> While applications are of course not > obliged to support the PUA, if they choose to do so there should be no > expectation that they are party to any agreement. And so a group of > users with a private agreement can reasonably assume that software which > supports the PUA in general supports their particular agreement.
Since there is not and cannot be any common specification for what it means for an application to support the PUA, no assumptions can be made by users about what an application does beyond what the application vendor explicitly commits to. There is no rule anywhere that says that an application must support whatever their customers might assume about the PUA. The application vendor itself is a user of the Unicode Standard, and is free to make it's own private assumptions. (Of course, it may help their customers if they don't make too many assumptions.) Peter Peter Constable Globalization Infrastructure and Font Technologies Microsoft Windows Division
