> Which seems to make Unicode a defender of the status quo. Inaction is > as political as action. "We are holders of the standards > for the technology for encoding symbols, and we won't admit new symbols > until they are widely used..." not necessarily the intent, but possibly > the impact - that evolution of symbolic communication will be hampered?
Ooh, throwing red meat to the lions! When speaking of status quo ante, it is important to keep in mind the perspective you have on the matter. The status quo for most Unicode developers was the existence of a large, and proliferating collection of overlapping, incomplete, and only partially interoperable character encodings (numbering in the multiple hundreds) that made internationalization engineering a mess and which resulted in countless opportunities for data corruption when attempting to operate in a global information context. Furthermore, many useful characters, including some national scripts and many minority and historic scripts, were completely unrepresentable in any significant character encoding standard, and required local hacks based on fonts, typically non-communicable in email, on the web, or in common document formats. In that context, the Unicode manifesto was a revolutionary one, in that it basically advocated junking the established approach, and deliberately flew in the face of the established, standard framework for extending character sets -- ISO 2022. And the developers of Unicode deliberately created a development organization -- a cabal, if you will -- outside the ISO framework, to pursue the vision. As for many successful revolutions, the original ideals have been compromised and battered a bit in the resulting struggle, and the new ideas have begun to take on the patina of "establishment" as they succeed. The revolutionaries themselves have become pragmatists and compromisers -- at least the ones still involved -- since they value success of the overall revolution over ideological purity at the end of the day. On the other hand, it is also true that the Unicoders are typically rather conservative when it comes to the actual encoding of writing systems that they do. As Michael Everson pointed out, this is partly a natural result of a shared belief that Unicode should encode characters that are in use, and thereby known to be useful. It has been reinforced by over a decade's worth of experience in encountering collections of "stuff" that might, by some stretch of someone's imagination, be characters, but without much evidence of real use for any significant textual interchange. The conservatism is also a result of the need to maintain credibility in what is presented for encoding, since part of the compromise over the years has now resulted in the Unicode Consortium working hand in glove with ISO to promote and extend the joint standards, rather than butting heads with ISO in competition to create rival standards. >From this point of view, it is easy to see how the Unicode Consortium could end up being seen as an obstructionist organization dedicated to the status quo. If your passion is as a script reformer -- or even just to overturn something in a little way by introducing a new symbol to improve something, then you need all the traction you can muster, since writing systems, orthographies, symbol conventions, and the like are well-entrenched cultural systems with lots of inertia, and are very difficult to change significantly. And since the Unicode Consortium is busy promoting a successful worldwide character encoding, it seems a natural to come knocking on the door with your new script, new orthography, or new basketful of symbols, since if they get into the successful, universal character encoding, you increase your chances of succeeding in the writing system reform. Yet the big, bad, Character Academy and its panjums close the doors and say, "No writing system reformers need apply!" So they become part of the problem -- part of the inertia which is standing in the way of the obvious, logical improvement that the reformer has in hand. What it comes down to, basically, is that the Unicode Consortium does not view writing system reform, spelling reform, writing convention reform, choice of alphabets, or the introduction of new systems or new symbols as part of its charter. Those are battles for other groups to deal with, in whatever the appropriate forums may be. Instead, the Unicode Consortium views character encoding reform to be its charter. But it is understandable how it might not be self-evident to those not deeply involved in the work of the encoding, where the boundaries of character encoding reform might be, nor why the UTC eagerly latches on to some proposals as being in scope and turns down others as out of scope. > not necessarily the intent, but possibly > the impact - that evolution of symbolic communication will be hampered? One last point. While it may be true that standardization of a character in Unicode makes it easier for all kinds of textual processing to deal with it, it is a little hyperbolic to suggest that lack of Unicode characterhood for some symbol will result in the hampering of "the evolution of symbolic communication". There are plenty of symbols that are fully outside the context of Unicode characters, including most obviously, these days, the flood of corporate logos that bombard us daily and pollute the visual landscape. ;-) Even for symbols that are more evidently character-like, such as the proposed newpi, there are plenty of ways to represent them in text, other than as a stadardized Unicode character, until more evidence of widespread use warrants character standardization. I am quite confident that the evolution of symbolic communication will take care of itself, with the help of or despite anything that the Unicode Consortium does in its standard. When something like the euro sign needs to happen, it will happen, and the Unicode Standard will play catchup along with everybody else, or be left behind. Or consider the DoCoMo rage on Japanese cellphones, or the evolution of "smileys" and netspeak and L33t 5p34k -- these are all happily barrelling along without any particularly noticeable hindrance by the Unicode Academicians. :-0 --Ken