Patrick Andries wrote:
<< I wonder sometimes if the largest obstacle in the encoding
of smileys as characters is not the "universal" normalization
process itself. Had they been invented a few decades ago and
encoded "locally" in some kind of popular font/encoding (the
Netscape font for example that could have the iconic :-) :-(
;-) :-P :-D :-[ :-\ found in Messenger) they might have been
included in Unicode without much further ado. I personnaly
see them as punctuation mark (albeit not of "metaprosodic"
nature).>>
Patrick,
There are whole scripts for contemporary languages which
are as yet unencoded in the Unicode Standard and some
punctuation and other chararacters missing from already
encoded scripts. IMO attention needs to be paid to making
sure all these characters are encoded before we start
bothering with Klingon, smileys, & etc.
All the "smiley" characters you need could perhaps be
encoded by using one of the existing two plus one of the
variant selector characters. If you really think they are
some sort of important modern day "punctuation" then
document it, make a formal proposal and follow it through.
- Chris
-- Christopher J Fynn DDC Dzongkha Computing Project PO Box 122, Thimphu, Bhutan
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Sat Feb 16 2002 - 02:15:18 EST