Corrigendum #9

Richard COOK rscook at wenlin.com
Thu Jul 3 13:02:08 CDT 2014


On Jul 2, 2014, at 8:02 AM, Karl Williamson <public at khwilliamson.com> wrote:

> Corrigendum #9 has changed this so much that people are coming to me and saying that inputs may very well have non-characters, and that the default should be to pass them through.  Since we have no published wording for how the TUS will absorb Corrigendum #9, I don't know how this will play out.  But this abrupt a change seems wrong to me, and it was done without public input or really adequate time to consider its effects.

Asmus,

I think you will recall that in late 2012 and early 2013, when the subject of the proposed changes (or clarifications) to text relating to noncharacters first arose, we (at Wenlin) expressed our concerns. Some concerns were grave, and some of the discussion and comments were captured in this web page:

<http://wenlininstitute.org/UnicodeNoncharacters/>

There was much back and forth on the editorial list. Discussion clarified some of the issues for me, and mollified some of my concerns.

At that time we did implement support for noncharacters in Wenlin, controlled by an Advanced Option to:

	Replace noncharacters with [U+FFFD]

This user preference is turned on by default.

Not sure if revisiting any of our prior discussion would help clarify the evolution of thinking on this issue.

But I did want to mention that the comment “without public input” is not quite correct. As is so often the case, and as the web page above shows, there was input and discussion. Whether the amount of time given to this was really adequate is another question. Work required may expand to fill the available time, and perhaps more time is now available.

-Richard






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