NNBSP

[Shawn Steele via Unicode]

>> Keeping these applications outdated has no other benefit than providing a handy lobbying tool against support of NNBSP.
I believe you’ll find that there are some French banks and other institutions that depend on such obsolete applications (unfortunately).
Additionally, I believe you’ll find that there are many scenarios where older applications and newer applications need to exchange data.  Either across the network, the web, or even on the same machine.  One app expecting NNBSP and another expecting NBSP on the same machine will likely lead to confusion.
This could be something a “new” app running with the latest & greatest locale data and trying to import the legacy data users had saved on that app.  Or exchanging data with an application using the system settings which are perhaps older.
>> Also when you need those apps, just tailor your French accordingly.
Having the user attempt to “correct” their settings may not be sufficient to resolve these discrepancies because not all applications or frameworks properly consider the user overrides on all platforms.
>> That should not impact all other users out there interested in a civilized layout.
I’m not sure that the choice of the word “civilized” adds value to the conversation.  We have pretty much zero feedback that the OS’s French formatting is “uncivilized” or that the NNBSP is required for correct support.
>> As long as SegoeUI has NNBSP support, no worries, that’s what CLDR data is for.
For compatibility, I’d actually much prefer that CLDR have an alt “best practice” field that maintained the existing U+00A0 behavior for compatibility, yet allowed applications wanting the newer typographic experience to opt-in to the “best practice” alternative data.  As applications became used to the idea of an alternative for U+00A0, then maybe that could be flip-flopped and put U+00A0 into a “legacy” alt form in a few years.
Normally I’m all for having the “best” data in CLDR, and there are many locales that have data with limited support for whatever reasons.  U+00A0 is pretty exceptional in my view though, developers have been hard-coding dependencies on that value for ½ a century without even realizing there might be other types of non-breaking spaces.  Sure, that’s not really the best practice, particularly in modern computing, but I suspect you’ll still find it taught in CS classes with little regard to things like NNBSP.
-Shawn

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