From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Fri Jan 02 2009 - 03:16:08 CST
On 1 Jan 2009, at 22:25, David Starner wrote:
>> Who is opposing the proposal? (Independents, many of whom are
>> unpaid volunteers, or whose livelihood does not depend on the
>> encoding process.)
>
> At the very least, Everson is against it and I'm for it.
I am?
No, David. I am *for* having salient and relevant questions answered
so that a proper evaluation of the material can be made.
1. I want their HTML spreadsheet to add transliterations of the
Katakana and translations of Kanji (and Katakana where not a loadword)
so that the home-grown identity of the characters can be evaluated.
2. I want to know the name of the person making the font and I want to
see the font and it doesn't matter to me if it's "finished" or a work-
in-progress. So far all of this has been kept a secret.
3. I want to see Doug Ewell's usage query answered properly.
> One could also argue that if independents are against it, it's
> because they tend to be more a fan of the pure ideal, rather than
> what has to be done in reality to get the job done.
I like encoding symbols. I like to err on the side of generosity in
encoding, too. I'm not very interested in protestations about what
symbols are "text" or not. The UCS has a lot of bad symbols encoded
(most of the Zapf set for instance) and yet there are many, many
fairly common symbols which ought to be encoded but which haven't
been. The UTC is inconsistent: at any given meeting a proposer never
knows where he will get push-back or on what. I've had things sail
through and I've had extremely frustrating push-back.
(The solution for Egyptological Yod was one such fiasco. I proposed to
use a Cyrillic diacritic, and was told "No"; I went (at some expense)
to Vienna and met with computational Egyptologists who favoured a pre-
composed character with no decomposition; in the end we were told to
use the Cyrillic diacritic.)
This set of symbols is controversial. I would like to devote some
energies to reviewing it, but the proposers need to do 1) 2) and 3)
above, or I think my energies would be wasted. The simplest thing for
them to do would be to respond to those three points. If they don't do
it now, they will certainly have to do so in WG2.
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com
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