Character Range: surrogate blocks

Richard Emberson (emberson@faslab.com)
Sat, 17 Oct 1998 15:18:23 -0700

To extend the available characters in Unicode one
can use to 16 bit characters with surrogate blocks.

Now in production rule #2 titled Character Range
surrogate blocks are explicitly excluded (along
with FFFF and FFFE).

Does that mean that if one were reading a character
stream that included characters not in the basic
set of Unicode characters (those not using surrogate
blocks) that it would be a wellformedness violation?

There are the extra, beyond 16-bit, characters specified
by the spec in production rule #2 as "[x10000-#x10FFFF]".
Is this how Unicode characters that use the surrogate
blocks get represented in an XML document? Is there
an algorithm for the convertions defined somewhere?

Short of getting a copy of the Unicode 2.0 spec, is there
anywhere where the conversion algorithm is documented?

Why was it decided to exclude the uses of surrogate
block-base Unicode characters within XML documents?

Thanks.

Richard