On 2013/04/23 18:01, William_J_G Overington wrote:
On Monday 22 April 2013, Asmus Freytag<asm...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
I'm always suspicious if someone wants to discuss scope of the standard before
demonstrating a compelling case on the merits of wide-spread actual use.
The reason that I want to discuss the scope is because there is uncertainty. If
people are going to spend a lot of time and effort in the research and
development of a system whether the effort would all be wasted if the system,
no matter how good and no matter how useful were to come to nothing because it
would be said that encoding such a system in Unicode would be out of scope.
[I'm just hoping this discussion will go away soon.]
You can develop such a system without using the private use area. Just
make little pictures out of your "characters", and everybody can include
them in a Web page or an office document, print them, and so on. The
fact that computers now handle text doesn't mean that text is the only
thing computers can handle.
Once you have shown that your little pictures are widely used as if they
were characters, then you have a good case for encoding. This is how
many symbols got encoded; you can check all the documentation that is
now public.
A ruling that such a system, if developed and shown to be useful, would be
within scope for encoding in Unicode would allow people to research and develop
the system with the knowledge that there will be a clear pathway of opportunity
ahead if the research and development leads to good results.
As far as I know, the Unicode consortium doesn't rule on eventualities.
So, I feel that wanting to discuss the scope of Unicode so as to clear away
uncertainty that may be blocking progress in research and development is a
straightforward and reasonable thing to do.
The main blocking factor is the (limited) usefulness of your ideas. In
case that's ever solved, the rest will be comparatively easy.
Regards, Martin.
