Re: What Unicode means to us

[Michael Stone]

Aaron,
      I happen to agree with Dan about the unwieldiness of replacing 
characters with their full names during character translation, but your 
idea of using Unicode equivalents seems more palatable.  I'm going to 
ignore the issue of how this method of handling errors fits into the 
scheme of possible error-handling methods, for the moment, because I 
want to talk about that in a separate email.  Having said that, I have a 
few specific questions about some of your design choices.  It's late and 
I'm tired, so I'm probably a bit incoherent.  If you have trouble 
understanding me, let me know and I'll try to clarify.  So, first:

How are you going to choose between different canonical compositions and 
compatability compositions when such a choice has to be made?  For 
example, when encoding combining characters, vertically oriented text, 
or Korean jamo vs. syllables, how will you pick between the four 
different normalization forms?

If a transparent conversion is required to get a string into Unicode 
before transforming out of it, do we print the source character or its 
Unicode equivalent if an error occurs?

Michael