From: Leo Broukhis (leob@mailcom.com)
Date: Fri Jan 02 2009 - 12:27:15 CST
On Fri, Jan 2, 2009 at 9:32 AM, Peter Constable <petercon@microsoft.com> wrote:
> From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org] On Behalf Of Leo Broukhis
>
>> Would it be possible to solve this problem by designating a set of
>> "telecom compatibility characters"
>> without going into the details of their semantics in the canonical
>> character names,
>> so that each TELECOM COMPATIBILITY CHARACTER NNN
>> will be standardized as "NNN" drawn in a distinctive way, but in
>> practice a multitude of "fantasy" fonts
>> (or rather picture banks) of varying colorization and animation will be used?
>
> Well, it would be possible to encode characters with such names, though it's not clear how that would be better: either the semantics of each given character NNN would be documented *outside* the Unicode and ISO 10646 standards, or there would be no basis for any interchange. Either way, the purpose of encoding the characters in these standards seems to be defeated.
Keeping the canonical names semantic-free and documenting the
semantics du jour in comments will allow the vendors to react to
public preferences faster as the whole range will be valid, and will
get rid of the controversy related to the arbitrariness of the
character set. The comments could trail a newly adopted character
semantics by a year or so - it's still better than having to push a
new proposal for every CRAB-like character (e.g. Google has e-1E3 that
is missing from the proposed emoji list).
Leo
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