[tei-council] classy measurements

[Syd Bauman]

> As a general principle, compatibility characters are in Unicode for
> compatibility ... we should not recommend the use of any of these
> at all.

Good. That knocks one set of problems off the list, and I was mighty
suspicious of those characters, anyway.


> Now with respect to the problem you have here, that is, assigning
> single codepoints to units of measurement,

Just want to make clear ... I am not *trying* to assign single
code-point symbols to units of measurement: I am trying to assign the
*right* symbols to units of measurement. I'm actually kinda pleased
those compatibility characters aren't the right ones to use. In
general I prefer the SI symbols when they're available.


> If you look at the Unicode codepoint area U+3380 to 33DF you see a
> pretty long list -- do you really want to include them all?

Uhhh... no, not at all. I only want to include a few units for now
(which is why I said "list some of the most common symbols"), but
more importantly these are all compatibility characters, and thus off
the table, are they not?


>  I think it would be better to just state the general principle in
> the tagdoc and point to a list where these codes are enumerated.

As I said, this is the general goal, but I haven't found a single,
one-stop-shopping document we can point to.


> > Later, after we've finished straightening out the classes, I
> > think 2 or 3 of us should come up with a concrete proposal for
> > how to encode units in a Unicode environment. How to put such a
> > proposal into a tagdoc file is another problem entirely (which I
> > foreshadowed with "problems with our declaration system", above
> > :-), because the values of ident= of <valItem> need to be
> > xsd:Names. This suggestion defers having to deal with this, too.
> 
> See above. none of our business, luckily.

I'm sorry, I don't understand what part you don't think we should be
worrying about. If we don't give TEI users advice on how to encode
units, who will?

Remember, it's not obvious; furthermore it's often arbitrary. In such
cases, the world is generally better off if we all agree on one
particularly arbitrary representation, so they're all the same. E.g.,
it would be a lot nicer if *everyone* used "in" instead of some TEI
folks using "in", some using "inch", and some using "inches".