From: Doug Ewell (doug@ewellic.org)
Date: Sun Dec 21 2008 - 00:23:20 CST
David Starner <prosfilaes at gmail dot com> wrote:
> I'm not sure how much more needs to be said. Plain text is what people
> are using as plain text.
The philosophical/ethics response to this would be that if the
boundaries of plain text are that subjective and fungible, then there
really are no boundaries, and we ought to either (a) encode all text as
images or (b) accept William Overington's proposals to define characters
that mean PLEASE PAINT THE FOLLOWING TEXT RED WITH YELLOW SPARKLES.
>> Well, thank goodness I never suggested any of these.
>
> Then what are you suggesting?
*Not encoding* the images that do not meet the established criteria for
encoding. Letting the cell-phone vendors define private-use characters
for them. (That is not the same as "endorsing permanent private use
code assignments," which implies that Unicode itself is doing the
endorsing.)
>> How, for example, are we supposed to distinguish between CHICK and
>> HATCHING CHICK unless our fonts and rendering engines (or printed
>> pages) support animation?
>
> It's the difference between a chick and a chick popping out of an egg.
Have you seen the comparison chart? Two of the three vendors used the
same image for both "characters." The third vendor defined an
animation. If any of them had offered a static picture of a chick's
head popping out of an egg, that might have been more convincing --
though it remains to be proved that these images both have semantic
value, and are not just pictures of what they are pictures of.
-- Doug Ewell * Thornton, Colorado, USA * RFC 4645 * UTN #14 http://www.ewellic.org http://www1.ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages ˆ
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