2012-05-29 11:43, Asmus Freytag wrote:
Sovereign countries are free to decree currency symbols,
Everyone and his brother can decree a currency symbol, too, or some other symbol.
The simple fact is, the usage scenario for currency symbols is such that immediate availability as character code is required by a whole country (and its partners in commerce).
It may be true, or valid, but it is neither simple nor a fact. It is a conclusion drawn from rather abstract premises, not something immediately observable and objective, i.e. a fact.
“Immediate availability” is an illusion, as I have pointed out. If you mean that the character, as a coded character, should be immediately available for implementors to use, then it’s a different thing. Judgment call, not a fact.
Kvetching doesn't make a difference, it just reflects badly - especially if it comes from anyone whose country happens to have its currency "covered".
This is not about currencies; it is about currency symbols. And it’s not a casual oddity that some symbols like “$” and “£” are “covered.” They are in Unicode, and mostly available in fonts, and often recognized by programs and people properly as being in the currency symbol category, because they have been used such a long time.
Surely it makes sense to acknowledge that some large community is going to use a new symbol, even in text, and encode it in Unicode. We can just hope that people realize that this won’t magically make it “work.” It’s just a small technicality that lets implementors start using an assigned code point, instead of Private Use codepoints or, worse still, codepoints assigned to other characters. In software design, this is a minor detail, effectively the value of one parameter.
So what’s disturbing here is the apparently political move of giving one particular symbol a high priority in a manner that affects the whole process. The process of adopting new characters to Unicode may be slow, but I guess there are reasons behind this. It’s disproportionate to regard a currency symbol as an emergency case. It sets a questionable precedent.
Yucca
