RE: Emphasis skip property? [W3C I18N Action #99]

Thanks Markus and Mark.

 

I did not expect that there would actually be a change to the GC (which is why I wrote the sentence in the circuitous way that I did). However, to Mark’s point, the effect needed is similar to “NotReallyPunctuation”.

 

My real question is: how do we get this on the agenda for the UTC in a future version of Unicode? And how do we track it? Do we need to produce some kind of proposal? Periodic emails are probably not the answer…

 

Addison

 

From: Mark Davis Ⓤ <mark@unicode.org> 
Sent: Friday, May 24, 2024 2:28 PM
To: Markus Scherer <markus.icu@gmail.com>
Cc: Addison Phillips <addisoni18n@gmail.com>; petercon@unicode.org; craig@unicode.org; asmus@unicode.org; Ken Whistler <kenwhistler@sonic.net>; public-i18n-core@w3.org; Florian Rivoal <florian@rivoal.net>; fantasai@inkedblade.net; unicoRe@unicode.org
Subject: Re: Emphasis skip property? [W3C I18N Action #99]

 

That may sound like a joke, and the name I mentioned certainly is, but we have done similar things before to address issues where compatibility constraints came into play.

 

On Fri, May 24, 2024 at 2:21 PM Mark Davis Ⓤ <mark@unicode.org <mailto:mark@unicode.org> > wrote:

I proposed changing some of the obvious errors in Po some years ago, but there was concern about disruption. I suppose we could have a NotReallyPunctuation property...

 

On Fri, May 24, 2024 at 12:12 PM Markus Scherer <markus.icu@gmail.com <mailto:markus.icu@gmail.com> > wrote:

On Fri, May 24, 2024 at 11:28 AM Addison Phillips <addisoni18n@gmail.com <mailto:addisoni18n@gmail.com> > wrote:

The issue pertains to the use of emphasis marks (e.g. Japanese bouten). It is customary to skip punctuation characters in these emphasis systems. See [2] and [3] below for specific text (where there is a list of symbols affected).

 

CSS found that the Unicode general categories don’t align nicely with which characters to skip. W3C doesn’t want to maintain the list of characters to skip/not skip: it would probably make more sense for Unicode to maintain it. Participants speculate that this might be achieved by splitting a general category or via some Unicode property (or some other mechanism).

 

Splitting a general category is verboten.

https://www.unicode.org/policies/stability_policy.html#Property_Value

The enumeration of General_Category property values is fixed. No new values will be added.

 

It sounds like one of the things you are asking is whether Unicode would change the General_Category of #%‰&@... from Po to So. Is that right?

General_Category values can be changed, but the distinction between punctuation and symbols is fuzzy, and changing gc values for commonly used characters (especially ASCII) can be very disruptive.

 

markus