Re: [I18ndir] [art] Fwd: New Version Notification for draft-bray-unichars-05.txt

[Tim Bray <[e-mail]>]

On Sep 19, 2023 at 4:04:02 PM, Rob Sayre <[e-mail]> wrote:

>
> There are still some bugs here. Generally, I think "Abstract Character
> Repertoire" as used here is good:
> https://unicode.org/reports/tr17/#Repertoire
>

> Making it clear that the various encoding and escaping routines happen
> before or after this idea. I don't think you need to add "Abstract" as a
> qualifier. Just explain it.
>

Yeah, per comments below, we need to tighten up the definition of what we
mean when we say “character repertoire”, will do so.


> > The Unicode Standard's definition of "Unicode character" is conceptual.
> > However, each Unicode character is assigned a code point, used to
> represent
> > the characters in computer memory and storage systems and, in
> specifications,
> > to specify the allowed repertoires of Unicode characters.
>
> I think you want to add: "Not all code points represent characters."
>

I think this is rather fully covered in the immediately following paragraph.


> > In ABNF, the hexadecimal values for characters are preceded by "%x"
> rather than "U+"."
>
> But these are code points in the ABNF, right? For example:
>

Right, but we haven’t defined “code point” yet, so I just took out “for
characters” - In ABNF, hex is signaled by %x

https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-bray-unichars-05.html#section-4.1
>
> "; exclude surrogates"
>
> These are in the problematic code point types. They are not characters.
> So, it's probably best to go through and clean that up.
>

Hmm.  I think it will suffice to clean up the definition of “character
repertoire” - none of ours include surrogates, thus this production, but
some of ours include noncharacters.  Which I think is OK, I really want to
retain the term "character repertoire" because that maps to the way people
think about the problem: “What Unicode characters should I allow?” That’s a
reasonable question to ask; to answer it, you have to learn about code
points and scalars and surrogates and so on. Thus this document.

I think the "Restricting Character Repertoires" section should be run
> through a grammar checker (MS Word or something). It doesn't say anything
> incorrect, but I often thought "hmm, there should be a comma there" and
> little things like that. Thank you for taking the "conforming JSON text"
> suggestion, but the capitalization differs between the two uses: "JSON
> text" vs "JSON Text".
>

If this progresses, there will be lots of opportunities for language
revision.


>