From: Doug Ewell (doug@ewellic.org)
Date: Thu Jan 27 2011 - 12:34:31 CST
Neil Harris <neil at tonal dot clara dot co dot uk> wrote:
> I wonder if the best approach to take to this class of proposals would
> be to point their proponents in the direction of the Private Use Area,
> and documentation on how to make their own fonts in freely
> distributable formats, and then invite them to come back when they
> have a large community of real-world users using their new writing
> system to exchange plain-text messages for non-artificial purposes, at
> which point they could then apply to go through the normal process for
> encoding?
That is the right approach to take for writing systems. That is not the
right approach to take for entities that have nothing to do with writing
systems.
There is no shortage of information items, and classes of information
items, that lend themselves to being encoded in some way. Software
developers concern themselves with this every single day. There are
weather forecasts and dog breeds and security-badge access levels and
Mozart string quartets, all of which can be assigned a code element of
some sort. That does not make these items characters, and it does not
make it appropriate to encode them in a character encoding standard, any
more than it would be appropriate to encode Cyrillic letters in the
Köchel-Verzeichnis.
-- Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA | http://www.ewellic.org RFC 5645, 4645, UTN #14 | ietf-languages @ is dot gd slash 2kf0s
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