On 11/22/2000 01:39:53 PM Thomas Chan wrote:
>Maybe you should also be asking what the difference between U+0041 LATIN
>CAPITAL LETTER A, U+0391 GREEK CAPITAL LETTER ALPHA, and U+0410 CYRILLIC
>CAPITAL LETTER A is called.
You call it the same thing as the difference between U+10A0 GEORGIAN
CAPITAL LETTER AN and U+126D ETHIOPIC SYLLABLE VE: a character difference.
>> I like "Astral Planes" better.
>I don't. I write in Cantonese and some of contents of Plane 2 are very
>much down-to-earth for me. Are you a musician? If so, then Plane 1 would
>be important to you, too.
>
>Throwing around terms like "Astral Planes", whether official or not, will
>just engender lack of credibility for Unicode, which has already happened
>to some extent among people who heard about some "Klingon" (in the Private
>Use Area) in Unicode.
I agree that, since there are official terms, "supplementary planes",
"supplementary characters" etc. that we should encourage their use. It is
true that some question credibility of Unicode and that the use of esoteric
terms or occasional allusions to literary classics like The Hitchhiker's
Guide to the Galaxy probably don't contribute to building credibility. On
the other hand, the thing that will most strongly build credibility is
seeing Unicode supported in software implementations, and this is
happening. I won't be surprised, on the day that Unicode 3.1 is published,
if MS makes available from the MS Office web site a font and IME update for
Office 10 that provides support for all of those new Han ideographs you've
all been waiting for. (I believe Office 10 will ship with everything else
that would be needed to support these characters.) Things like that give a
lot of credibility to Unicode. So, if in our discussions on this list John
Cowan refers to an astral character or two, or if I invite someone to the
restaurant at the end of the universe, I don't think that will hurt much.
- Peter
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Constable
Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International
7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA
Tel: +1 972 708 7485
E-mail: <peter_constable@sil.org>
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