RE: Questions regarding U+FD3E ORNATE LEFT PARENTHESIS and U+FD3F ORNATE RIGHT PARENTHESIS

Peter asked:

> > I'm surprised you'd think that changing the 
> > mirroring property of these characters would be a good move.

And Kent responded, for which I must supply a few corrections:

> 1) These characters were relatively recently encoded in Unicode,

False. They date from the original publication of 10646-1:1993
(and Unicode 1.1 as well, of course).

> and there is likely not very many documents using the ornate
> parentheses in a Unicode encoding. 

False. Although, of course, it is always possible to quibble
here about what "not very many" actually means.

> Furthermore, they are not
> present in commonly used non-Unicode encodings.

False. This is why HCI explicitly requested they not be
mirrored. They *are* present in the Iranian national standard,
deliberately synched with Unicode for Bidi.


> 6) Of course it would have been better to have gotten this
> "right" early on (and I did give it as a beta 5.0 comment),

Of course. But see my other reply in the thread. This is *deep*
history, and goes back way, way, way before the beta discussion
for Unicode 5.0.

> but mirroring is not fully stabilised, and can be changed.
> In this case I think the positives of a change here still far
> outweigh the negatives (which was VERY much NOT the case for
> quote marks and a mirroring change).

I agree with that assessment for the quote marks, which is
why I opposed changing their mirrored status all along.
But it turns out that there are folks already heavily invested
in the anomalous mirrored status of FD3E/FD3F as well. So
it is basically hopeless trying to pursue any change for
them further.

--Ken