And I will remember not to implement the official standard whenever I come across such a note, but rather to avoid "mis-applied conservatism" by following everyone else in breaking the standard.
I would have phrased it as: "... in following everyone else in maintaining compatibility with existing practice."
As I explained, in the part of my message you didn't copy, the existing practice in question involved characters that had a longstanding history predating Unicode. In this situation it makes little sense to expect that the characters behave one way if encoded in the legacy character set and another way if encoded in Unicode.
Ideally the fact that the specification as written happened to contradict widespread legacy practice would have been noticed and raised much sooner. Such feedback, by the way, is welcome any time.
But if the UTC has already made a decision on this change, why is it included in a current public review issue?
It's a review of a decision by the UTC.
Is the public review genuine?
Yes.
If someone makes an objection to this change, will it be considered?
Yes - it will be considered on its merit. If frivolous, ill-formed, unintelligible, etc. it might not get a lot of consideration. If it is well-considered, brings solid new information, and makes a good case, it can result in the UTC overturning or modifying an earlier decision.
Depending on the issue, the UTC is often interested in learning about information that would further support a decision it has taken - either so it can be added to the documentation, or so it reinforces and extends the rationale for it.
I have no objection to this change, but it does make me wonder if my responses to other public review issues are in fact a waste of time because the UTC has actually already decided the issue.
Let me, in reply, just encourage you to focus your energy on submitting information that's relevant to improving the decisions made by the UTC.
A./
