Philippe Verdy wrote:
And it will still remain enough place in the remaining planes to
define later a few more surrogates of a new type, if really needed for
a future, upward compatible, standard if it ever comes to reality —
such as having an open registry of corporate logos or glyph designs,
managed by registrars, and served by Internet like Internet domain
names (up to the online delivery of these glyphs or logos with
"Internet-hosted fonts"), i.e. for encoding objects that won't be
worth the need to warranty a long term stability within Unicode/ISO/
IEC 10646 themselves, as these encoded objects will depend largely on
the lifetime of exclusive IP rights and are already not in scope of
Unicode/ISO/IEC 10646. And when these technolgoies will be developed,
nothing will prevent the Unicode/ISO/IEC 10646 standards to make a
reference (later) to these mechanisms (for the online delivery of
compatible fonts supporting these standards, both open fonts, or fonts
with private designs, presented as a collection of glyphs in this
external repertoire, plus registered selection rules).
Lots of things in the world have been encoded, or could benefit from
being encoded.
There is no need for things that are *not characters* in the
Unicode/10646 sense to be encoded either directly in Unicode/10646
itself, as others have suggested, or in a Unicode/10646-compatible
framework, as you appear to suggest.
It is perhaps a tribute of some sort to the elegance of Unicode/10646
that people seem to want to use it to encode things that are so
desperately far out of its scope.
--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA
http://www.ewellic.org | @DougEwell
