Re: [idn] opting out of SC/TC equivalence

[Martin Duerst <duerst@w3.org>]

At 18:17 01/08/29 -0700, liana.ydisg@juno.com wrote:
>That is not the case.  If IETF does not want to put TC/SC
>folding in [nameprep], then it has no good reason to
>agree a versioning table to include GB, Big5, KSC, JIS to
>  transliterated ACE map.  In that case, I am no motivation
>to push for Unicode to accept the long list of radicals.
>I can sit back and see how long this will go, as I have been
>assumed that by now the TC/SC should have been in there
>long time ago, which has been proved by James that I
>was wrong.

What you are implying here, and you have said elsewhere, is
that the TC/SC problem can be made easier by decomposing
Chinese characters into components (usually called radicals).

It is true that for the bulk of the straightforward TC/SC
equivalences, it is sufficient to just change a single radical,
and that in some other cases, it is sufficient to just change
more than one radical.

However, considering the operational complexities of:

A) Defining and maintaining decompositions of Chinese
    characters into radicals for use in TC/SC mapping.
B) Defining and maintaining TC/SC mappings directly.

are about the same. The size of the tables is the same
order. And in any case, there are exceptions that cannot
be covered by radical decomposition (in particular, there
are exceptions where radical decomposition would give
the WRONG result), so just doing B) is more straightforward.


**But all this is largely irrelevant**, as you say. There are
two problems that are orthogonal to the above choice:

1) The problem of 1-to-many, many-to-1, and many-to-many
    mappings. We have not yet seen a working proposal that
    addresses these.

2) The fact that we have to handle not only Chinese, but
    also Japanese and Korean.

So I agree with you that there is no reason to press the
Unicode consortium to add more radicals, for multiple reasons.

Regards,   Martin.

P.S.: Completely unrelated to IDN:
       I have spent about two years of my life doing research
       on decomposition of Kanji and related subjects, and
       published a few papers.
       If you are interested, please send me private mail,
       and I can send you a .ps version.