- From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <Harald@Alvestrand.no>
- Date: Thu, 16 Dec 1999 23:40:13 +0100
- To: Kenneth Whistler <kenw@sybase.com>
- Cc: ietf-charsets@iana.org, kenw@sybase.com, mark.davis@us.ibm.com
At 14:20 16.12.99 -0800, Kenneth Whistler wrote: >I think we may be talking at cross-purposes here. *I* am responsible >for maintaining the content of http://www.unicode.org/pending/pending.html, >by the way. > >UTC and ISO/JTC1/SC2/WG2 *both* are committed to allowing encoding in >Planes 0..16. Oops....apologies; I managed to read your 0..16 as "0". That's my second stupid error this debate.....my brain must be rotting.... >Plane 2: SIP ~47000 Han characters (Vertical Extension B) under ballot > ~18500 still assignable code points [haring off on an unrelated topic] one thing I'm not connected enough to have found out: Is this large set *new* characters, or are parts of the set used for rolling back the unifications that created so much tension in and around the IRG, for people who want that? ....... >So that big gap in planes 4..13 looms unused and effectively unusable. >Nobody in the professional character encoding community has any >candidates to put there that would really count as characters. There >are various bizarre schemes that could eat numbers, but as long as >10646 and the Unicode Standard remain *character* encoding standards, >it is quite likely that those 10 planes will simply be held in >reserve. This is enough engineering slack on the character encoding >to last through this upcoming century easily, even if the World >Congress on Universal Orthography decides to invent and impose a >new world orthography each and every decade. :-) > >That is why the UTC and WG2 just want to formally close the books >on this. 16 bits turned out not to be enough for everything that >somebody wanted to encode as characters. But all projections are >that 21 bits *is* enough, and we can hold the line there. Nobody >needs 31 bits for character encoding. I read you. And see no reason to disagree. A pity that 21 is not a power of 2.....but that's well beyond the ability of standards comittees to accomplish. Harald -- Harald Tveit Alvestrand, EDB Maxware, Norway Harald.Alvestrand@edb.maxware.no
Received on Friday, 17 December 1999 01:35:16 UTC