Robert Palais wrote:
> Which seems to make Unicode a defender of the status quo. Inaction is
> as political as action. "We are holders of the standards
> for the technology for encoding symbols, and we won't admit
> new symbols
> until they are widely used..." not necessarily the intent,
> but possibly
> the impact - that evolution of symbolic communication will be
> hampered?
Definitely hampered, if not entirely blocked.
But I tend to think that this is rather a general consequence of having a
well defined repertoire of characters, rather than a definite policy of
Unicode.
With traditional means such as pen and paper, we were free to invent and
immediately use any kind of new or altered graphical symbols.
When typography started, this freedom was definitely reduced, because all
new symbols required ahead planning and control over the lead type
producers.
With computers, each symbol has to be recognized in advance and identified
with a numeric code before it can be used. And each time a new symbol is
added to the code, all computers worldwide must be aware of it. So, now, the
freedom of inventing new signs is at its historical minimum.
And, yes: how the list of existing "characters" is managed, and who does it,
and following which criteria, has now become a new little problem of
democracy!
By some points of view, however, Unicode has been designed to be a little
bit more "democratic" than many other computer character sets that existed
before.
It contains a couple of relatively "subversive" features that, in theory,
grant a minimum of freedom:
1) Combining characters (such as accents or diacritic modifiers) which allow
modifying existing characters in a limited but significant number of ways.
(But there also are pre-composite combination such as "à", so most platforms
did not bother implement them).
2) A large "Private Use Areas" (PUA) which contains characters whose
interpretation is not defined a priori, and that can be used for encoding
symbols not otherwise present in the standard. (But there is the problem of
how to privately agree with other users on the meaning of these slots, and
you must be in control of fonts and rendering engine in order to display
your characters).
3) A newly added "operator" (ZWL) which allows joining two characters into a
single unit. (But I don't know of any implementation of this, and it is not
supposed to generate new visual symbols, however).
4) A set of "operators" called Ideographic Description Character (IDC) for
specifying the shape of Chinese ideographs which are not part of the
standard. (But Unicode merely "permits" rendering such expressions as if
they were actual Chinese ideographs: there is no obligation to do so and,
consequently, no implementations exist, as far as I know).
These are all small things, compared to the freedom allowed by paper and
pen, but you must consider that the computer technology we have been used so
far doesn't even grant these.
_ Marco
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Jan 18 2002 - 13:35:36 EST