At 06:07 PM 3/16/02 +0200, Sampo Syreeni wrote:
>If such a bottleneck has formed inside Unicode Consortium and/or ISO, we
>have to wonder whether those organizations have the requisite capacity to
>manage a standard as important as Unicode. If the bottleneck is in lacking
>proposals, this cannot be used as a reason not to include synthetic
>scripts which *do* have a standing proposal.
Like all organizations, neither Unicode nor ISO have infinite resources.
Unlike other organizations the work is done on a voluntary basis. In other
words, rather than evaluate whether the organizations are the right ones,
what you should evaluate is whether you (and others interested in
particular outcomes) should contribute to the work being done.
A second limit seems to exist in the rate in which the larger community of
users and implementors of the standard can absorb changes, where changes
does include the addition of new scripts. Many detail issues are only
discovered once suppport for a given script is wide-spread enough for
theory to have to withstand the test of a messy practice. Without
discovering these detail issues, the encodings - however well intentioned -
will indeed remain theories. I have no advice on how the rate of
implementation can be changed to speed up that part of the process.
However, the discovery of detail issues that need to be sorted out with
character properties and guidelines (or, sometimes, additions of
characters) itself takes bandwidth out of the coding committees. In
practice this means that the process of fine-tuning the encoding of any
script is a doubly limited process. Due to the fact that so many living
scripts have been encoded for over a decade, the process of fine-tuning
these is in full swing and is already taking up a large percentage of the
committees' time and effort.
Within limits, additional contributors could ease the burden for the
existing team. as I have indicated above. However, adding manpower itself,
initially takes away from the bandwidth - it is therefore not a short term
solution. In the longer term, it would be very desirable to have more
volunteers that are actively involved in the support of non-living scripts,
not just on the philological side, but also on the technical side.
The surest way, by the way, to bring the work to a complete and screeching
halt is to entertain the idea of moving the work to a different team
altogether and starting from scratch in a new environment. The subject
matter is complex and interdependent enough that there is no need to make
the work ten times more difficult by removing 'institutional memory' and
replacing well-tested processes and patterns of cooperation with
reinventing the wheel.
A./
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