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"Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com> wrote at Sun, 19 Oct 2003 10:47:06 -0400:
> mc@xegesis.org (Mike Champion) writes:
...
> >exit :-) Tim's approach is taking a real, widespread problem and
> >offering a clean, layered solution -- essentially a character encoding
> >preprocessor -- rather than changing XML itself.
>
> This makes me laugh hysterically, as the original notion of Unicode was
> to develop a big enough space that all the characters could live in
> happy co-existence without need for layering in the character space.
Actually, that's more the original ISO/IEC 10646 approach that didn't
pass its draft ballot in the period before the Unicode Consortium and
the ISO/IEC WG merged their repertoires.
(It also resembles recent fanciful unofficial proposals on the Unicode
list, but those threads petered out.)
> Unicode itself ran out of room and put in surrogates. Now it seems
Yes. I don't doubt that 65,000 characters seemed like enough back in
1988, or that a (fixed) character size larger than 16 bits would have
been an even tougher sell back when Unicode was getting established.
> that we've run out of patience and added yet another layer of
> processing in the middle.
Yet the proposal under discussion doesn't attempt naming either 65,000
characters or 1,000,000+, so I don't see why surrogates have anything
to do with it.
Regards,
Tony Graham
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