I agree with Alstair.
The list of font technology options was mostly to show that there are
already a lot of options (some might even say too many), so font
technology doesn't really limit our choices.
Regards, Martin.
On 2017/03/27 23:04, Alastair Houghton wrote:
On 27 Mar 2017, at 10:14, Julian Bradfield <jcb+unic...@inf.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
I contend, therefore, that no decision about Unicode should take into
account any ephemeral considerations such as this year's electronic
font technology, and that therefore it's not even useful to mention
them.
I’d disagree with that, for two reasons:
1. Unicode has to be usable *today*; it’s no good designing for some kind of
hyper-intelligent AI-based font technology a thousand years hence, because we
don’t have that now. If it isn’t usable today for any given purpose, people
won’t use it for that, and will adopt alternative solutions (like using images
to represent text).
2. “This year’s electronic font technology” is actually quite powerful, and is
unlikely to be supplanted by something *less* powerful in future. There is an
argument about exactly how widespread support for it is (for instance, simple
text editors are clearly lacking in support for stylistic alternates, except
possibly on the Mac where there’s built-in support in the standard text edit
control), but again I think it’s reasonable to expect support to grow over
time, rather than being removed.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable, then, to point out that mechanisms like
stylistic or contextual alternates exist, or indeed for that knowledge to
affect a decision about whether or not a character should be encoded, *bearing
in mind* the likely direction of travel of font and text rendering support in
widely available operating systems.
All that said, I’d definitely defer to others on the subject of whether or not
Unicode needs the Deseret characters being discussed here. That’s very much
not my field.
Kind regards,
Alastair.
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