From: Francois Yergeau (FYergeau@alis.com)
Date: Wed Dec 11 2002 - 11:55:00 CST
Henry Spencer wrote:
> It seems to me that he's being a bit inconsistent: "yes, 10646 did
> eventually say that assignments end at 10ffff,
Not quite: 10646 still officially extends to 7FFFFFFF. They do have a
*policy* not to assign chars above 10FFFF as long as there is space below.
A WG (or perhaps SC, dunno) policy is not a standard.
> but I choose to believe
> that there is still need to encode things up to 7fffffff".
This is ISO's stance, not mine. Myself, I like the following computation:
if the rate of allocation of characters were to be maintained (~6800/year
since 10646 1st edition), we could go on for ~130 years before hitting
10FFFF. Given that the big chunks of Han characters are already allocated,
the rate will in fact go down, unless SETI efforts prove fruitful and we end
up having to encode Alpha-Centaurian. I'm not holding my breath.
> However,
> talking him out of this may be difficult; as he notes, it is
> basically a religious issue.
It's not *me* that you need to influence; I'm only the editor, trying to
reflect the consensus of all those involved. The forum is
ietf-charsets@iana.org, archives at
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-charsets/.
The religious issue is IETF's preference for ISO standards (supposedly
"open") vs other "standards" such as Unicode.
> Actually, he is doing exactly that: disregarding the clear
> statements of
> today's standards because he thinks they will change! (Although he is
> admittedly doing so in a way that has less chance of causing
> trouble...)
>
> However, my point remains: today's standard is RFC 2279, not
> Yergeau's
> draft. Whatever might happen to the draft, today's standard
> does include
> the 5- and 6-byte sequences, so pretending otherwise is inappropriate.
Err, that's contradictory! Am I disregarding the standard or just telling
it like it is?
-- François Yergeau