As writing systems can be quite complex, there is often useful information about a character that cannot be found in the Unicode Character Database or the Unicode Standard, but is present in one of the proposals leading up to its inclusion.
To this end I have half-jokingly suggested that it would be useful to have an informative numeric property 'last informative proposal'. A non-missing value xxxx would indicate that the last proposal to contain useful information about it would be held as http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/nxxxx.pdf . Now, there can be problems with establishing the value - it may be require a judgement call as to when revised proposals started to provide less useful information. There are also subtle variations in the URI. Now, I don't seriously expect the Unicode Consortium to take on the task of setting up such a database, but are there any publicly available databases with such information or a reasonable approximation? A poor approximation - but a lot better than nothing - is the derived age property which records when a character entered Unicode. One problem with using a search engine is that the name and code point proposed for a character can change during the encoding process. Richard.
