From: Doug Ewell (doug@ewellic.org)
Date: Sat Dec 27 2008 - 11:22:16 CST
David Starner <prosfilaes at gmail dot com> wrote:
> I am frustrated that so many would prefer to encode scripts that have
> audiences of less than a hundred people over characters that would be
> of great use to millions.
I am frustrated -- yes, that's a human emotion; there's probably an
emoji for it -- that nobody has chosen to address my question from
several days ago, asking whether we could find out if these 600+ symbols
are actually used by these millions of people who supposedly find them
"of great use," or if they are simply *available* to millions of people.
Instead, it is simply taken on faith that all of them are necessary.
There are plenty of emoji that are clearly meaningful and useful and
shared by all three vendor sets, and I'm sure a database scan would
reveal a high level of usage. These are consistent with the Unicode
principles of encoding symbols that carry semantic meaning and are used
in running text. There are plenty of others that are nothing but
pictures of the item in question. There is no evidence that anyone is
using BEAR or BOOK WITH VERICAL FILL [sic] as anything but a decoration.
These images are NOT consistent with the encoding principles, and there
appears to have been no critical review of which emoji fall into which
category. Only the logos, which *must* be excluded, have been excluded.
When scripts like Glagolitic are proposed, there always seem to be
discussions about certain "edge" characters which may or may not be
worthy of encoding, regardless of the merit of others in the script.
These are often glyph variants or poorly attested characters. Has
anyone applied this process to BABY CHICK and FRONT-FACING BABY CHICK
and HATCHING CHICK? Only one vendor (KDDI) makes a distinction in their
local sets, yet Unicode is happy to disunify them.
This is not a question of favoring the needs of a hundred over the needs
of millions.
-- 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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