From: Karl Pentzlin (karl-pentzlin@acssoft.de)
Date: Sat Jan 17 2009 - 09:56:47 CST
Am Samstag, 17. Januar 2009 um 08:42 schrieb Asmus Freytag
(Re: Revised Comments on some emoji symbols e-000 ... e-521,
regarding inherent colors of emoji symbols, on the Unicode and Emoji
lists):
AF> ... this is like the card suits in the 26xx block. They are called
AF> black and white, even though they are obviously intended as black and
AF> red. You would overturn a precedent ...
The card suit symbols, as they are encoded, are not suited as
precedence for handling inherently or explicitly colored characters.
If these symbols were encoded today, there probably were four symbols
according to the four suits, simply named
*U+xxx1 CARD SUIT SPADE
*U+xxx2 CARD SUIT HEART
*U+xxx3 CARD SUIT DIAMOND
*U+xxx4 CARD SUIT CLUB
without specific reference to colors, as spade and club are implicitly
black, while heart and diamond are implicitly red, and there are no
color variants which would qualify as distinct characters.
However, the suit symbols are not encoded due to a requirement to have
card suit symbols in Unicode. These symbols are inherited from another
encoding industry standard, presumably the IBM code page 437 ubiquitous
during the DOS area, which contains the four card suit symbols as filled
variants (as color was at the time expressed by character cell
attributes independent from the character itself).
These characters all were "black" in the Unicode sense.
For whatever reasons this characters were doubled at the time they
were introduced into Unicode (version 1.1 according to the DerivedAge
table). In the first sequence U+2660...U+2663, the "red" ones were
included as hollow characters ("white" in Unicode terminology) while
the "black" ones were left filled. In the second sequence
U+2664...U+2667, the filled variants (i.e. these presumably taken from
the original source) were added, and hollow variants were added for the
"black" ones without apparent reason (symmetry?).
Thus, the card suit symbols are no precedence for including any symbols
today, except anybody would propose some symbols to include as a filled
("black") and additionally as a hollow ("white") variant, e.g. encoding
emoji e+04F as two characters BLACK CHERRIES and WHITE CHERRIES.
A valid precedence for naming colored characters is (as I wrote in my
original mail on the Unicode and Emoji lists) U+2591...U+2593 which are
correctly named by their shade without causing any problems.
Thus, it will be correct to name emoji e+051 RED APPLE and e+05B GREEN
APPLE, as these characters are symbols for red apple and green apple.
This does not imply to introduce any new properties or encoding
principles into Unicode.
Any scheme to map real colors onto other terms, however, does
introduce a new encoding principle.
Doing such without any compelling reason and without having reached a
broad consensus within a public discussion participated by all relevant
bodies is strongly opposed.
- Karl Pentzlin
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