Unicode Explained

Any breaking of a URL to several lines should be accompanied with the use of suitable

delimiters, as recommended in Appendix E of RFC 3986. It recommends surrounding

a URL with whitespace (spaces or line breaks) or, when used in text, enclosing a URL

in quotation marks or between the characters < and >. Many publishers use yet another

method: they print a URL in a font that differs from the normal font. Similar consid-

erations can be applied to strings other than URLs: avoid breaking a string without

indicating somehow that the parts belong together.

Unicode Conformance Requirements

As mentioned in Chapter 4, full presentation of the conformance requirements relies

on concepts related to character properties, and it was therefore postponed to be given

here.

Conformance to the Unicode standard is voluntary. The motivation for making soft-

ware conformant is that it can then be honestly marketed as Unicode conformant and

it can be expected to cooperate with other Unicode conformant software in a predict-

able manner.

Note that wording like “this program supports Unicode” does not really make a claim

on conformance. In practice, this often means just that the software internally operates

on Unicode representations of characters. Conformance to the Unicode standard

means more: several rules on the interpretation and processing of characters must be

satisfied.

On the other hand, conformance does ...