From: Doug Ewell (doug@ewellic.org)
Date: Wed Mar 25 2009 - 07:53:18 CST
James Kass <thunder dash bird at earthlink dot net> wrote:
> Some of us have recently had our collective noses rubbed
> in the notion that propriety of use has little to do with
> text character standardization nowadays.
James brings up a good point. The rules we grew up with are not the
same today. We've seen that the old distinction against "characters vs.
glyphs" and the restrictions against encoding "idiosyncratic... [or]
novel characters... [or] logos or graphics" no longer apply, or may be
exempted from by labeling the proposed entities "compatibility
characters." Even corporate logos can now be encoded if they are named
"compatibility symbol," and if a dashed box with numbers is used as the
reference glyph. No proof of attested usage is required, only potential
usage.
So the door is indeed wide open, and if William's object code tokens are
indeed inappropriate for Unicode, it is not for the traditional reasons.
I'd suggest, then, that if William wants these to be considered for
encoding, it might be helpful to actually build a virtual machine that
interprets them and works correctly, and see if it can be embedded in,
or made widely available as an add-on to, a popular product such as
Adobe Reader, Firefox, or Google Chrome. (It might help if this
mechanism is seen as strategically important to an organization
represented on the UTC.) Demonstrate that the mechanism works, and
ideally that it will not lead to a rash of viruses and spyware and
browser takeovers. Establish popular usage in the PUA so that the
"interoperability" and "existing implementations" arguments are
compelling, and then write your proposal for Unicode.
-- 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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