Re: XML Blueberry

[Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>]

At 12:15 PM +0900 7/8/01, Murata Makoto wrote:
>Rick Jelliffe wrote:
>
>>Of these, most are CJK Unified Ideographs Extension B.  These are characters
>>which must be considered bad practise for use in markup, perhaps with some
>>exceptions.   They are mostly characters which readers may easily find
>>confusing,
>>being archaic, regional, variant, uncommon or non-interoperable.
>
>This is completely different from what I have heard from CJK experts.  Do you 
>have any supporting evidence?
>

I would never classify myself as an expert on these scripts. However, I do note that "The Supplementary Ideographic Plane, or Plane 2, contains a very large collection of additional unified Han ideographs known as Vertical Extension B,
comprising 42,711 characters, as well as 542 additional CJK Compatibility ideographs." Every expert I have heard from has told me that the typical speaker  of one of these languages recognizes under 10,000 ideographs. Thus it seems very probable that most of the new characters can't possibly be recognized by most of the speakers of the affected languages.

However, there are certainly some characters in this list that are common in at least some places. For instance, one of them is the first person singular pronoun in one variation of Chinese spoken by several tens of millions of people, clearly a common word for them though perhaps not one they'd be likely to use in an element name. 

What I think we need to speak intelligently about this is a list. Of these 42,711 + 542 characters how many of them are common and recognized for at least some significant user population? Such a list might be incomplete, but if indeed any of these characters are necessary it should be possible to construct. Given the number of characters in that list and their meanings we could then make intelligent decisions about the benefit to be gained by adding them vs. the cost of doing so. 
-- 

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