I strongly agree that all Unicode
implementations should cover all of Unicode, and not just the BMP, and it really
annoys me when they don't; but suggesting that you need to implement supra-BMP
characters because they are going to start popping up all over the place is
wrong in my opinion (not that Doug suggested that, but that's my extrapolation
of his point). Software developers need to implement supra-BMP characters
because some users (probably very few) will from time to time want to use them,
and software should allow people to do what they want.
Actually, about 10% of the glyphs in the Japanese fonts that ship with Mac OS X are represented by characters in plane 2. The main reason they are there is because they are used in names (people, places, and companies). So there are real customers who want to use characters outside the BMP. I would not characterize it as "very few". That's true of the vast majority of SMP characters, but not all of them.
Deborah Goldsmith Internationalization, Unicode Liaison Apple Computer, Inc. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
