- From: Martin J. Dürst <duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp>
- Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2014 16:00:45 +0900
- To: Ken Lunde <lunde@adobe.com>, Bobby Tung <bobbytung@wanderer.tw>
- CC: "public-zhreq@w3.org" <public-zhreq@w3.org>, CJK discussion <public-i18n-cjk@w3.org>, 中文HTML5同樂會ML <public-html-ig-zh@w3.org>
On 2014/12/12 00:09, Ken Lunde wrote: > Bobby, > > Allow me to insert a few comments about this particular issue. > > First, the name of the mailing list suggest that a Chinese version of JLREQ and (the still-in-development) KLREQ is in the works. If so, that's great news. > > About the middle dot in Traditional Chinese, based on the exchange between Addison and me yesterday, both U+30FB and U+FF0E must be removed from the equation, because the former has strong ties to Japanese-only usage (and because Chinese fonts may not include a glyph for this character) and the latter is a full-stop (aka period) that happens to be centered within the em-box for Traditional Chinese use. > > That leaves U+00B7 and U+2027, but U+2022 should also be considered. Hello Ken, You say "U+30FB ... must be removed from the equation, because [it] has strong ties to Japanese-only usage (and because Chinese fonts may not include a glyph for this character)". The later might make a reasonably good reason for the time being (but could be fixed). But I don't understand the former. Characters in Unicode are not tied to languages. U+30FB is named "KATAKANA MIDDLE DOT", but that's a misnomer, it's used in many places where no katakana are around. See https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/中黒. That also shows that the use cases, although not exactly the same, are pretty close to those mentioned by Bobby in his first mail (see also https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/间隔). Appearance also seems to be extremely close if not the same, definitely within the kinds of variance that has to be dealt with anyway to address Han unification. And the characters seems to be intrinsically full-width, which would favor U+30FB over U+00B7. On the other hand, U+2027 (HYPHENATION POINT) and U+2022 (BULLET) seem to be semantically totally different from what we are looking at. In summary, I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but it would be highly preferable to have something better than the inherently circular "this character is only used in Japanese so it cannot be used in Chinese". Regards, Martin.
Received on Friday, 12 December 2014 07:01:16 UTC