Handling unknown ISO/IEC 10646 numeric char refs

David - Morris (dwm@shell.portal.com)
Mon, 8 May 95 01:22:57 EDT

On Fri, 5 May 1995, Gavin Nicol wrote:

> Wrong, the system must support a *subset* of ISO 10646 to be
> conforming. Numeric character references that exceed the system
> character set code point range can be mapped in an entirely
> application specific manner, and the system will still be conforming.

I fail to understand the usefulness of this approach to the ultimate
end user.

> ISO 10646 support is primarily an abstract idea. If the application
> see 〹 and simply uses the lower 8 bits as the code, this is
> fine because we can say in the abstract that the system maps the

Perhaps 'fine' in a legal sense but it has NO value to the poor end
user. It is patently stupid UI design to map 〹 to abstract
nothingness thereby neither satisfing the original author OR giving
the viewing user any way to even distinguish between 〹 and 〺.

If nothing else, a human knowing how to interpret 〹 might be able
to figure out what is wrong with the system software they are using.

I'll add a few more concise thoughts in response to DanC's post.

Dave Morris