On Sun, 17 Mar 2002, Asmus Freytag wrote: >Like all organizations, neither Unicode nor ISO have infinite resources.
Of course. I actually think both the Unicode Consortium and the ISO are doing a fine job. The point was, if there was a problem prioritization could solve, it still wouldn't be the *right* solution. Seeing it this way, talking about allocation priorities seems more like an excuse than a real argument. >In other words, rather than evaluate whether the organizations are the >right ones, what you should evaluate is whether you (and others >interested in particular outcomes) should contribute to the work being >done. Yes. I've thought about that quite seriously, but haven't exactly found my niche, yet. >A second limit seems to exist in the rate in which the larger community >of users and implementors of the standard can absorb changes, where >changes does include the addition of new scripts. Many detail issues are >only discovered once suppport for a given script is wide-spread enough >for theory to have to withstand the test of a messy practice. Naturally. But e.g. Klingon (unlike Tengwar) is such a simple script that it wouldn't really have needed anything new -- Linux kernel and font support already exist. The Klingon proposal simply asked for a small number of codepoints outside the BMP. This makes the refusal pure policy; what we're now having is then a policy debate. >Due to the fact that so many living scripts have been encoded for over a >decade, the process of fine-tuning these is in full swing and is already >taking up a large percentage of the committees' time and effort. Believe me, I appreciate those efforts. I can't begin to understand how something as massive as the Han Unification effort was ever made to work. >In the longer term, it would be very desirable to have more volunteers >that are actively involved in the support of non-living scripts, not >just on the philological side, but also on the technical side. That's interesting. You don't suppose you (or someone else?) could outline some of the current technical challenges, or the long term foreseeable problems in such support? >The surest way, by the way, to bring the work to a complete and >screeching halt is to entertain the idea of moving the work to a >different team altogether and starting from scratch in a new >environment. Absolutely. Wrt synthetic scripts, I would at most suggest something like delegating the bulk of the preliminary encoding effort to some respectable collection of interested individuals, perhaps assigning a codepoint range to such scripts, and leaving the final allocation routine to UCC/ISO. I.e. something along the lines of the IRG. Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED], tel:+358-50-5756111 student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2
