From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Mon Jan 19 2004 - 15:08:53 EST
Dean Snyder <dean dot snyder at jhu dot edu> wrote:
> But now that I know that it is already part of the model for some
> scripts in Unicode and is being considered for further use, as in Han
> and Hebrew,
Is it being considered for Han and Hebrew? I hadn't heard that before,
and I wonder if that wouldn't break the existing model for those
scripts.
> I question whether this is the technical hair-brained, off-the-wall
> idea some have tried to make it out to be.
>
> But, of course, it bears more investigation.
Sorry to jump in on this, because I know less about Cuneiform than most
lemurs do about neurosurgery, but I have to bring up a procedural point.
If it is true, as Michael says, that the UTC and any other relevant
bodies have made the decision to encode Cuneiform using a "static"
instead of a "dynamic" model -- that is, encoding each identified
character individually instead of encoding pieces and a mechanism to put
those pieces together -- then that is pretty much the end of it. It is
no longer the time to go back and revisit architectural decisions
already made. It is time to make sure the characters and their
properties are identified, and gather any other useful information on
topics that have NOT already been decided.
Just over a year ago I tried to reopen the matter of "strongly
discouraging" Plane 14 language tags. I believed (and still do, to some
extent) that these tags could provide a valuable plain-text service, in
matters such as script disambiguation. But the matter had already been
resolved, and I learned a valuable lesson: Sometimes the best thing to
do is just *drop it* and move along, even if you believe in your heart
that you are right.
Without knowing anything about Cuneiform, I would say it is time to drop
it and work together, within the chosen architectural model, filling in
whatever gaps remain so that Unicode Cuneiform can be made available to
the world.
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
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