XML is supposed to solve all the world's other information-transfer problems; maybe it works for this too.This seems highly excessive. We already have plenty of PUA space. All what we need is a standard way (file format? protocol?) to transport PUA character properties, and possibly encode a reference (URI?) to the definition file or service. If Unicode does not want to do this job, at least it could participate in such independant development by commenting about the protocol/format used to encode these properties (notably to make sure that the system remains extensible and can encode new properties that may be added later).
There's probably a lot of programming complexity in getting this to work (I dunno, compile it into an OT table on the fly? Or can it all be in OT somehow?), and I'm not sure that anyone can make such a standard, and if so it probably isn't Unicode. But it would be the most flexible solution to the problem, if it could be done.
~mark
