I wrote, crumpled up, and threw away about three different responses. I thought about ISO 2022 and about accessing the web for every PUA character, as Asmus mentioned, and about the size of the user base, as Martin mentioned. I thought about character properties and about ephemerality.
I didn't think of the spoofing implications that Asmus described, which would affect both the automatic PUA font download and the inline drawing language. Either of these could be used to spell out, let's say, "paypal.com" rather convincingly and with minimal effort. I might have more experience with the PUA than many list members, having transcribed the 27,000-word "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" into my constructed alphabet two years ago, in a PUA encoding, so that Michael Everson could publish it in book form. One of the many learning experiences of this project was finding out which software tools play nicely with the PUA and which don't. Some tools "just worked" while others would not give acceptable results with any amount of effort. At no point, however, did I suppose that a font with my alphabet, or any of the jillions of others that have been invented "during a boring day in class" (see Omniglot for tons of examples), should be silently downloaded to a user's computer, consuming bandwidth and disk space, without her knowledge. That's practically malware. Maybe I'm just not enough of a Distinguished Visionary to understand how insanely great this would be (unfortunately, celebrity name-dropping doesn't work with me). Unicode has stated consistently for at least 23 years that it would not ever standardize PUA usage, and over the years some UTC members have used terms like "strongly discouraged" and "not interoperable" even in the presence of an agreement. Given this, and given that no system I'm aware of magically downloads fonts for *regularly encoded characters* (I still have no font for Arabic math symbols), I personally would not expect Unicode to perform a 180 on this. -- Doug Ewell | http://ewellic.org | Thornton, CO 🇺🇸
