From: Doug Ewell (doug@ewellic.org)
Date: Sat Jan 10 2009 - 22:51:46 CST
Peter Constable <petercon at microsoft dot com> wrote:
> Now, we're all also willing to consider things like math operators and
> dingbats...
>
> Of course, there are things like BEL, DEL, DC1 and ESC that
> indisputably are characters, yet have nothing at all in common with
> "a" -- nothing, that is, except that they get exchanged between
> devices and processes in the same protocols with the same kind of
> representation...
>
> We don't disagree on "a" or on “∈” (U+2208 element of); we all accept
> (or, at least, tolerate) “✂” (U+2702 black scissors) and “𝅘𝅥𝅮” (U+1D160
> eighth note). But when it comes to RAINBOW (e-00D, attested cases of
> which are polychromatic) or DANCER (e-1BD, attested cases of which are
> animated), there is disagreement.
These "precedents" have been discussed already. BEL and DC1 and friends
were added because 1-to-1 convertibility with ASCII, a 1967 standard,
was paramount to the success of Unicode -- nobody questions that. The
dingbats were added to 1.0 because they too were part of a *pre-1993*
industry standard, appearing in laser printers of the day. The math
operators and musical symbols were expressly stated not to set a
precedent for encoding symbols of arbitrary scope.
It looks like "don't think this sets a precedent for anything" is a
vacuous statement, which means that current promises about not encoding
additional emoji beyond the set currently promoted by Google should be
treated with similar skepticism.
-- 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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