Re: String name and Character Name

From: Hans Aberg (haberg@math.su.se)
Date: Sat Apr 23 2005 - 12:32:34 CST

  • Next message: Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk: "Re: String name and Character Name"

    At 10:27 -0700 2005/04/23, Doug Ewell wrote:
    > > With policy of unique character names in hand, I see a scheme like
    >> follows: Unicode has a site, where private characters are registered
    >> by name. Registration may require some additional information, like
    >> providing rendering glyphs in a common, public format, for public
    >> use....
    >
    >Ask William Overington how receptive Unicode is to this idea.

    Well, I can only present the input.

    > > In any case, a private character number, once used for
    >> something, should never be used for anything new, in order to avoid
    >> confusion.
    >
    >You'd be amazed how quickly 137,000 code points would fill up, as every
    >high school kid who's ever invented an alphabet rushes to "register" it
    >with Unicode:
    >
    >http://www.omniglot.com/writing/conscripts.htm
    >http://www.langmaker.com/neographies.htm
    >
    >Not to mention the fact that the PUA would no longer be available for
    >"real" private use.
    >
    >No, I'm afraid this is not going to happen.

    We are essentially back at a discussion held here sometime ago: The
    limit of number of Unicode code points is due to design flaw in the
    UTF-16 encoding, where the engineers who did it failed to properly
    separate the notions of character numbers and integer-to-binary
    encoding. If one makes that separation, it is easy to extend the
    ranges to even to infinity, if one so likes. This can easily done
    with UTF-8/32, and also with some effort with UTF-16. One can then
    have sufficiently many private code points for every citizen of the
    world to register as many characters they can by hand. Note though
    that a requirement of supplying a glyph in a public rendering format
    would probably diminish the number of submissions. One can also have
    other restrictions, to exclude submissions which in some ways are not
    considered serious. But the examples on the pages you indicate would
    probably qualify for inclusion. 

    -- 
   Hans Aberg

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