Standards are fun

One of the more helpful things I’ve seen included in a standard:

These code points may be useful for…

Of course, what those who produced the standard actually meant to say was more like:

These code points may look like they might be useful for… but since we’ve not actually defined appropriate semantics that’s not actually the case.

It’s depressing how often one encounters such half-written standards – not just cases where things haven’t been considered at all but cases where the dots just haven’t been joined up. Of course, in a very large document it’s not hard to miss the odd thing like this. Yet another case where minimalist elegance has a lot to recommend it.