ietf-nntp [a-z] in Wildmats

[Charles Lindsey]

AIUI, we are agreed on CLive's formulation of wildmats, but have to choose
between versions with and without the [...] feature.

There is an issue which arises which we have not considered before, but
which has been the subject of debate in the USEFOR list. Some characters
are composite. For example, E ACCUTE is a single glyph possibly made up of
two characters, an E and a non-spacing ACCUTE. Alternatively, it can be
represented as the single character E ACCUTE, which is already present in
ISO 8859-1 and in Unicode. Moreover, the single character version is to be
preferred over the two-character version on account of the Unicode
"normalization" procedure NFC (which is being incorporated in the USEFOR
draft). So far so good. E ACCUTE in a newsgroup-name will be a single glyph
represented by a single character (or else somebody has screwed up).

BUT there are some glyphs where there is no single character form. For
example a TIBETAN LETTER PHA with a TIBETAN SIGN NYI ZLA NAA DA over the
top of it (no, I don't know whether that would be good Tibetan or not, but
you get the general idea). So what if you want to construct a [...]
including that glyph (or do I mean those two characters)? I can see
situations where either would be useful (Clive's present text is strictly
in terms of characters). But whereas one might be sensible in some
languages, the other might be so in other languages.

So I think it would be better to leave the feature out. Note that such
multi-character glyphs present no special problems in the rest of the
wildmat syntax, provided they are properly normalized.

BTW, when are we going to see a draft incorporating these latest agreed
changes?

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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