On Tuesday, June 24, 2003 6:30 PM, Rick McGowan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > U+2668 HOT SPRINGS is pleasant, but it's a lot less motivated -- to > > my mind -- than the DO NOT LITTER SIGN. > > Huh? The Hotspring sign appears in running text all the time -- in > Japanese travel brochures, for example. I've never seen the > do-not-litter > sign in running text like that. > > Rick I's remarkable to see that many symbols have been accepted and incorporated for ideographic languages which use them everyday even if they have no textual meaning, just as decorations, and we cannot accept a similar pictography or symbolism for alphabetized languages, as if it was not part of their cultural needs, and even if those symbols are widely recognized and understood, sometimes with a long history (for example the fleur-de-lys, or ermine)... The objection that they may carry some opinions seems strange when we already see a lot of religious symbols like christian crosses, islamic crescent of moons, traditional zodiacal symbols, ... As long as the symbol has some long history of cultural attachment and lots of publication, and already support a lot of recognizable variants, with known semantics; restricting their use only as images and not as text is not reasonnable. Howeer we can select some good criters to see if they should be encoded: - is there a reasonnably large population that recognize it? - can it be used free of rights by any writer or publisher? - is the symbol recognizable with a minimum common semantic with distinct colors or glyph variants or decorations ? - if the symbol has several semantics, depending on the people that use them (domain of activity, national cultures), do they still support in each context the same variations of their glyph representation or colors and textures ? - is it already encoded in a representation of another language ? (need to look in ideographic pictographs...) -- Philippe.
