> 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?
Ooh, throwing red meat to the lions!
When speaking of status quo ante, it is important to keep in mind the
perspective you have on the matter.
The status quo for most Unicode developers was the existence of a large,
and proliferating collection of overlapping, incomplete, and only
partially interoperable character encodings (numbering in the multiple
hundreds) that made internationalization engineering a mess and which
resulted in countless opportunities for data corruption when attempting
to operate in a global information context. Furthermore, many useful
characters, including some national scripts and many minority and
historic scripts, were completely unrepresentable in any significant
character encoding standard, and required local hacks based on fonts,
typically non-communicable in email, on the web, or in common document
formats.
In that context, the Unicode manifesto was a revolutionary one, in that
it basically advocated junking the established approach, and deliberately
flew in the face of the established, standard framework for extending
character sets -- ISO 2022. And the developers of Unicode deliberately
created a development organization -- a cabal, if you will -- outside
the ISO framework, to pursue the vision.
As for many successful revolutions, the original ideals have been
compromised and battered a bit in the resulting struggle, and the
new ideas have begun to take on the patina of "establishment" as they
succeed. The revolutionaries themselves have become pragmatists and
compromisers -- at least the ones still involved -- since they value
success of the overall revolution over ideological purity at the end
of the day.
On the other hand, it is also true that the Unicoders are typically rather
conservative when it comes to the actual encoding of writing systems
that they do. As Michael Everson pointed out, this is partly a
natural result of a shared belief that Unicode should encode characters
that are in use, and thereby known to be useful. It has been reinforced
by over a decade's worth of experience in encountering collections
of "stuff" that might, by some stretch of someone's imagination, be
characters, but without much evidence of real use for any significant
textual interchange. The conservatism is also a result of the need
to maintain credibility in what is presented for encoding, since
part of the compromise over the years has now resulted in the Unicode
Consortium working hand in glove with ISO to promote and extend the
joint standards, rather than butting heads with ISO in competition
to create rival standards.
From this point of view, it is easy to see how the Unicode Consortium
could end up being seen as an obstructionist organization
dedicated to the status quo. If your passion is as a script
reformer -- or even just to overturn something in a little way by
introducing a new symbol to improve something, then you need all
the traction you can muster, since writing systems, orthographies,
symbol conventions, and the like are well-entrenched cultural systems
with lots of inertia, and are very difficult to change significantly.
And since the Unicode Consortium is busy promoting a successful
worldwide character encoding, it seems a natural to come knocking
on the door with your new script, new orthography, or new basketful
of symbols, since if they get into the successful, universal
character encoding, you increase your chances of succeeding in the
writing system reform. Yet the big, bad, Character Academy and
its panjums close the doors and say, "No writing system reformers
need apply!" So they become part of the problem -- part of the
inertia which is standing in the way of the obvious, logical
improvement that the reformer has in hand.
What it comes down to, basically, is that the Unicode
Consortium does not view writing system reform, spelling
reform, writing convention reform, choice of alphabets, or
the introduction of new systems or new symbols as part of its
charter. Those are battles for other groups to deal with, in
whatever the appropriate forums may be. Instead, the
Unicode Consortium views character encoding reform to be
its charter.
But it is understandable how it might not be self-evident to
those not deeply involved in the work of the encoding, where
the boundaries of character encoding reform might be, nor
why the UTC eagerly latches on to some proposals as being
in scope and turns down others as out of scope.
> not necessarily the intent, but possibly
> the impact - that evolution of symbolic communication will be hampered?
One last point. While it may be true that standardization of a
character in Unicode makes it easier for all kinds of textual
processing to deal with it, it is a little hyperbolic to
suggest that lack of Unicode characterhood for some symbol will
result in the hampering of "the evolution of symbolic communication".
There are plenty of symbols that are fully outside the context
of Unicode characters, including most obviously, these days, the
flood of corporate logos that bombard us daily and pollute the
visual landscape. ;-) Even for symbols that are more evidently
character-like, such as the proposed newpi, there are plenty of
ways to represent them in text, other than as a stadardized
Unicode character, until more evidence of widespread use warrants
character standardization.
I am quite confident that the evolution of symbolic communication
will take care of itself, with the help of or despite anything
that the Unicode Consortium does in its standard. When something
like the euro sign needs to happen, it will happen, and the
Unicode Standard will play catchup along with everybody else, or
be left behind. Or consider the DoCoMo rage on Japanese cellphones,
or the evolution of "smileys" and netspeak and L33t 5p34k -- these
are all happily barrelling along without any particularly
noticeable hindrance by the Unicode Academicians. :-0
--Ken
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Jan 18 2002 - 15:26:37 EST