RE: [idn] stringprep comment 1

["Michel Suignard" <michelsu@microsoft.com>]

Not a chance. Unicode and ISO 10646 collect in fact some unneeded crumbs
that way. Once a character is officially approved for inclusion it is
there forever, whatever we don't like it or not. Characters get
deprecated (i.e. usage discouraged) but never removed. This is the price
you have to pay for stability and usage by other specification (like
IDN).

In the very early time of Unicode and ISO 10646 you could find some
counter-examples but then the installed based was still nascent, and
even then everybody got burned so bad that nobody would want to see that
now.
If you want to fix something, you add new characters and 'deprecate' the
old, but everything is still there.

BTW I don't think that you can prevent future characters to have folding
cases, you just don't want to fold to or from existing characters. If
new scripts have self-contained case folding we should be fine, right?
For example, Unicode 3.2 is adding new Cyrillic letters which obviously
have folding cases (like 048A and 048B). I don't think Unicode could do
such a broad promise.

Michel

-----Original Message-----
From: Yves Arrouye [mailto:yves@realnames.com] 
Sent: Thursday, January 31, 2002 7:49 PM
To: 'Paul Hoffman / IMC'; idn@ops.ietf.org
Subject: RE: [idn] stringprep comment 1


> Correct, but it does not need to, unless the Unicode Consortium goes 
> against their promises about how they will handle normalization of 
> newly-assigned characters. No new characters will be casefolded.

What about those cases (situations) where one wants to either delete
newly assigned characters? I mean, rather than prohibit them? How likely
is that?

YA