On 11/11/2012 2:08 PM, Doug Ewell wrote:
Personal opinions follow.
It looks like the only actual use case we have, exemplified by the
xkcd strip, is for a star with the left half black and the right half
white. There *might* also be a case for the left-white, right-black star.
Precedent is for encoding these in pairs and if there were any doubts
about the wisdom of this Simon Montagu's mail illustrates the bidi
ramifications (thanks to Frederic Grosshans for the reminder).
So, lets not prevaricate any longer and admit we have a a priam facie
use case for the pair.
Everything else, including one-quarter and three-quarter stars,
rendering tomatoes or doughnuts or film reels as "glyph variants" of
stars, facilitating a right-to-left rating system for Arabic- or
Hebrew-speaking environments, or turning Unicode into a standard for
rating systems in general, is a complete flight of fancy....
Flights of fancy, indeed. I couldn't have said it better.
I think in this case, as in many others, one introductory, exploratory
proposal would be worth ten thousand speculative mailing-list posts.
You said it.
A./
