L2/01-140
From:
Mark D.K. Whistler [aprfoolucode@comic.com]
Sent:
Sunday, April 01, 2001 8:52 AM
Subject: The Unicode Standard, Version 4.0
We are
pleased to announce the release of The Unicode Standard, Version 4.0. The
character repertoire in Unicode 4.0 is so far identical to that of Unicode
3.0.1, but it will soon increase thanks to *your* help.
The
primary feature of Unicode 4.0 is that the addition of new code points has now
been entirely *liberalized*. The Unicode Technical Committee, jointly with all
involved national bodies, has verified that all characters that are likely to
be needed for use on computers in the next millennium have already been added
with Version 3.0.1.
In a
recent e-mail to this mailing list, a respected official of The Unicode Consortium
wrote: "In other words, unless someone manages to wrest the standard
away from the two committees and puts
up a public website with an 'Encode Your Character Here For Free and Enter Our
Sweepstakes!' interface, I'm not going to worry about 'precious codespace' and
neither should anybody else."
Well,
now we can publicly announce that the words of that official were just an
anticipation of the decision that the UTC was in process of making. Unicode has
now so many empty slots that everybody can get one (or more) and encode
whatever he or she wishes!
Open
the form attached to this mail and be the first one to take advantage of the
new mechanism to propose Unicode characters.
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