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

[Asmus Freytag <[e-mail]>]

On 9/19/2023 4:04 PM, Rob Sayre wrote:
>
>
> 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.
>
I think that's a great clarification.
>
> I think you want to add: "Not all code points represent characters."
I think that's a great clarification.
>
> > 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:
>
> 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.

I agree with some of the commenters who mentioned that "problematic" is 
problematic because it combines two levels: code points that are not 
characters (whether surrogate or noncharacter) and a preference for a 
strict subset of the control codes. The former follows from the 
specification of the Unicode Standard. The latter is a preference, no 
matter how valid. And many other code points in Unicode are 
"problematic" in some way and in some cases, Unicode even recommends 
against their use.

Even though there may be different reasons to exclude some code points, 
the end effect is the same: adopting a restricted subset repertoire that 
excludes code points the protocol does not want to support. From that 
perspective, all of these are on the same level, which motivates a 
single umbrella term.

May have to guide the reader past a possible hang-up, though.

A./