From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Mon Nov 10 2003 - 19:32:51 EST
> At 01:57 PM 11/10/2003, Peter Kirk wrote:
>
> > Was it a whim that Theban
> >and Klingon were rejected?
First of all, Theban hasn't been rejected. It has never
formally been considered by either the UTC nor WG2 for
character encoding. Why? Because it is so patently obvious
that it is a Latin cipher:
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/theban.htm
And because there is consensus
in both committees that encoding of the potentially very
large number of arbitrary ciphers of Latin letters (and
other scripts as well) is *not* appropriate for Unicode.
This is not a "whim" -- it is a considered opinion and consensus
among professional character encoders of long standing.
And I don't see why it should be so difficult to just
accept the obvious here. Asking the list to come up with
an airtight and axiomatic definition of "cipher" which
will satisfy all users of the term and apply unambiguously
to every decision taken by the encoding committees is
basically irrelevant to the decisions taken here:
Theban is (obviously) a Latin cipher.
Because of that, nobody (seriously) involved in
10646 or Unicode has bothered to try to provide a
character encoding proposal for it.
Even *if* someone did, both committees would summarily
reject it, because they have clear consensus not to
encode alphabet ciphers.
Clear enough?
As for the Klingon (con)script, it *was* formally proposed.
It was not rejected on a "whim". It was rejected by
formal motion, based on a document which cited a whole
string of reasons why the Klingon (con)script should not
be encoded.
http://www.unicode.org/consortium/utc-minutes/UTC-087-200105.html
The vote, after discussion in the committee, was 9 for, 0 against,
with one abstention. Sounds like technical consensus to me.
--Ken
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon Nov 10 2003 - 20:14:24 EST