"international" characters?

[Patrick Durusau <patrick@durusau.net>]

Greetings!

The phrase "international characters" is used under small group (2.1.1) 
for named expression identifiers. It is noted that some applications may 
not display a glyph but an ISO 10646 code.

But, under text (string) (4.1), it is noted that "implementations 
*should* support Unicode strings, but *shall* at least support strings 
of ASCII characters."

Question: In all cases are we talking about Unicode strings in one of 
the defined representations (UTF-8), etc.?

Question: Or, is the string (4.1) language meant to allow a non-Unicode 
based encoding?

Question: If a non-Unicode based encoding, which definition of that 
encoding are we using?

I don't necessarily disagree but it does seem odd that Unicode support 
is required for identifiers but optional under text.

Noting that Unicode "support" doesn't necessarily mean that you get a 
meaningful display of the text. (Can someone more familiar with display 
issues comment on the usual behavior for missing characters? I seem to 
recall that all you usually see are some glyph but I don't remember 
which one. I don't recall it being the Unicode code number.)

Hope everyone is having a great day!

Patrick

-- 
Patrick Durusau
patrick@durusau.net
Chair, V1 - US TAG to JTC 1/SC 34
Convener, JTC 1/SC 34/WG 3 (Topic Maps)
Editor, OpenDocument Format TC (OASIS), Project Editor ISO/IEC 26300
Co-Editor, ISO/IEC 13250-1, 13250-5 (Topic Maps)