From: Asmus Freytag (asmusf@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Sun May 29 2011 - 20:54:26 CDT
On 5/29/2011 5:05 PM, Richard Wordingham wrote:
> Possibly they might have been omitted as not commercially
> significant - there was a time when Unicode was not intended to
> ultimately encode every script.
That's news to me, especially the latter part. I think you owe us the
some source for this claim.
From the beginning, "Universal" has been the been one of the primary
goals for Unicode (early papers would cite "Universal" as one of the
three sources of "Uni" in the name).
The Lao block was indeed coded very early, and the earliest versions of
Unicode were to a large extent a superset of then existing character
repertoires. Those existing repertoires were almost all based on modern
usage only, because most of them were from 8-bit character code sets,
which needed to be rather selective.
But it was always contemplated that additional research might attest
other characters (including historic or rarely used forms). These were
to be encoded after undergoing a formal review of a corresponding
character encoding proposal. Many scripts in Unicode have been extended
in this manner over time.
If these claimed Lao characters really represent attested characters,
such a proposal should be written up, submitted and reviewed.
Speculation why that didn't happen earlier and/or misstating the goals
of the enterprise are not helpful and will not contribute to getting the
right characters encoded.
A./
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