On 1/18/2019 2:46 PM, Shawn Steele via Unicode wrote:

>> That should not impact all other users out there interested in a civilized layout.

I’m not sure that the choice of the word “civilized” adds value to the conversation.  We have pretty much zero feedback that the OS’s French formatting is “uncivilized” or that the NNBSP is required for correct support. 

>> As long as SegoeUI has NNBSP support, no worries, that’s what CLDR data is for.

For compatibility, I’d actually much prefer that CLDR have an alt “best practice” field that maintained the existing U+00A0 behavior for compatibility, yet allowed applications wanting the newer typographic experience to opt-in to the “best practice” alternative data.  As applications became used to the idea of an alternative for U+00A0, then maybe that could be flip-flopped and put U+00A0 into a “legacy” alt form in a few years.

Normally I’m all for having the “best” data in CLDR, and there are many locales that have data with limited support for whatever reasons.  U+00A0 is pretty exceptional in my view though, developers have been hard-coding dependencies on that value for ½ a century without even realizing there might be other types of non-breaking spaces.  Sure, that’s not really the best practice, particularly in modern computing, but I suspect you’ll still find it taught in CS classes with little regard to things like NNBSP.

Shwan,

having information on "common fallbacks" would be useful. If formatting numbers, I may be free to pick the "best", but when parsing for numbers I may want to know what deviations from "best" practice I can expect.

A./


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