At 22:03 -0700 2001-07-05, rick@unicode.org wrote:
>That was in WG2, I guess... The most recent discussion material that UTC saw
>is a document I wrote, which is solely about Klingon and reasons for
>rejecting it.
WG2 never discussed Klingon, formally.
>Fictional or invented scripts aren't in and of themselves bad candidates for
>encoding, they should just be, in general, of low priority because, pretty
>much without exception, they are "toys". Shavian and Deseret are examples of
>scripts that needn't have been encoded now, and aren't very widely used, and
>aren't _NEEDED_ by anyone at all, but were encoded because a while back
>someone just happened to have done the work, and the proposals have just been
>sitting around gathering dust. Might as well get them in, because nothing
>more needs to be done to the proposals.
I don't think Deseret was fictional. Even if it was marginal. But
they were simple to encode.
>What's "bad" is that work seems to get done on fictional scripts while there
>are still millions of real people (some of whom even have access to
>computers) who can't express texts of their natively-used languages with
>Unicode because we don't have their scripts encoded.
Shavian and Deseret didn't take a lot of work. We did, however, a
fair bit of work on Linear B, Ugaritic, Cypriot, Old Italic, and
Gothic recently. I've tried to get progress on the Tai scripts, but
as the Chinese haven't sent delegations to the last two WG2 meetings,
naturally no progress has been made. (I am sure they will be turning
up to Singapore, and won't they be unhappy if I don't turn up, due to
the cost of getting there.... Sigh.)
>There are various reasons for that, the most common being that we
>can't get enough information about them. The most common reason for
>not having enough information is that we can't shlep enough experts
>to us, nor shlep enough of us to the experts, to complete any
>encoding proposals... a matter of time and funds.
Indeed. Cham (from Vietnam) should probably have been encoded long
ago. There are some outstanding questions, and there is the question
of improving the font for it.
-- Michael Everson
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Jul 06 2001 - 13:48:07 EDT