...Ken, I take many of your points. But in this last paragraph you are comparing two very different things.
I think you're spitting into the wind if you think you can force, through the character standardization process, the major platform vendors to support the kind of PUA functionality you are after, when they could do so *today* via much more extensible and architecturally sensible means given the existing PUA characters, but have not yet chosen to do so.
--Ken
If Ernest's proposal were accepted, major platform vendors could (although that does not necessarily imply that they would) implement it rather simply by updating the tables of character properties within their systems. Indeed I would expect such tables to be updated more or less automatically by some process of importing and compiling the Unicode character database (including the "default" properties for the PUA).
That is a far easier task than the one which they "have not yet chosen to do", to support tables of character properties within PUA fonts, because this latter requires significant software development effort and may not fit well within existing system architecture.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
