Re: [I18ndir] [art] Just uploaded draft-bray-unichars-03

[Steffen Nurpmeso <[e-mail]>]

Carsten Bormann wrote in
 <[e-mail]>:
 |The repertoire discussion actually is an interesting and useful one. \
 |The main point of modern network Unicode was to offer suggestions on \
 |repertoire, not based on historical mistakes (these can almost never \
 |be truly fixed), but on Design considerations that apply now and in \
 |the foreseeable future, helping designers to avoid repeating rookie \
 |mistakes. 

I am really silent now as i have seen in this thread much more
confined words than my own were.  But i do not know what you mean
when you say "historical mistakes" and

 |I would love to have this discussion, but not mixed up with apologetics \
 |for dumping out toxic waste into all protocols.  I would also like \

"toxic waste".
We are talking nothing but byte values, and it always depends on
the receiver on whether this is "toxic", or not.
Of course having C0/1 control characters in data can definetely be
toxic when you for example say "cat FILE" on a UNIX-style
terminal, even with a dedicated PAGER "less FILE" can be,
dependent upon flags that possibly come in via the process
environment of less(1).

But not to the smallest part this is because of decades and the
deep penetration of the use of these controls in software.
Forward looking: Unicode controls are not better!  In fact we
recently (last year or something) have had security problems
because of misuse of Unicode "controls" LEFT-TO-RIGHT++ aka
directional switches, where visual reviews did not reveal the
truth, and actual usage was real "toxic waste".

Now, even our JSON friend cannot forbid text direction switches,
so all that can be done is trusting that all software that
consumes the data ensures that no real overwriting takes place.
Usually data that is sent to a terminal has to undergo some
filtering, but data on the wire can be .. anything?
I personally treat it as a JSON problem when surrogates are
embedded into UTF-8, contradicting the UTF-8 standard.

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)