Re: [I18ndir] [art] New Version Notification for draft-bray-unichars-06.txt

[Rob Sayre <[e-mail]>]

On Sun, Oct 1, 2023 at 9:44 AM Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]> wrote:

> On 2023-10-01, at 18:41, Rob Sayre <[e-mail]> wrote:
> >
> > Sure, it starts there. But what it's really about is the messages you
> will receive, as our colleagues at AWS (and Twitter, and Mozilla, and IBM,
> and Microsoft, and Google) often rediscover.
>
> Right.  Simply reject broken Unicode.
>

Not always practical. That approach can cause problems with Java, C#,
Windows, and JavaScript, to name a few. For example, showing � in an email
is much better than throwing an exception. In consumer software, it's often
better to do something (anything) rather than enforce correctness. This
approach is why the web is so popular. It has broken links, nonsense
unicode, half-XML HTML, etc.

RFC 9413 is pretty sharp on this issue, though. That laxness can be the
correct decision at first, but any decision can become wrong over time. As
an aside, this is the best way to scale a software company: "the old code
was right at the time, or we wouldn't be here, but it's not the best way
anymore".



> > So, this document is a good thing to point people at.
>
> I believe we are still confused who this document is for and what we are
> trying to achieve.
>

I don't think we are. Its purpose is to help non-experts get Unicode basics
right. There is actually no such document aside from Tim's blog post*, so
we need this one.

thanks,
Rob

* https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2023/08/14/Unicode-Scalar-Value