Kenneth Whistler wrote as follows:
quote
Michael Everson and Doug Ewell already pointed out that neither the
UTC nor SC2/WG2 is going to endorse any standard interpretation of
any code points in the private use areas -- including any proposal
to specify certain code points as "guidance code points" for alternate
registries of private usage.
I'd like to emphasize that even further. What it means for a character
encoding organization per se to defend its designation of a code
point as "private use" is that it must *absolutely* guarantee that
that organization will never assign any standard interpretation to
that code point. To assign a character, or even some kind of generic
non-character-specific character semantics to a private use code point
would necessarily run afoul of someone's private usage of that code
point to indicate something else entirely.
end quote
I had written, quote:
I therefore put forward for discussion a suggestion of the possibility of
guidance code points for the private use area. I do this knowing that it
cannot ever be endorsed by the Unicode Consortium. However, I put the idea
forward in the hope that, maybe after such modification as people on this
list may suggest, the idea might be generally recognized by private
agreement by most people for most applications.
end quote
So, there is no basis for any disagreement on my idea on those grounds. The
Unicode Consortium would not be endorsing my idea nor would it be asked to
do so. The Unicode Consortium has given a freedom of action to all. I am
simply exercising the freedom that the Unicode Consortium has provided,
seeking to establish a private agreement by most people for most
applications, believing that that would be for the common good of the user
community, and also my own self interest as a member of that user community.
----I had originally written and was quoted by Kenneth Whistler as follows:
Whilst recognizing that anyone may define private meanings to the code points in the private use area I feel that it is not really as simple as that in practice as the word private used in this context does not really mean private in the usual context of the word private, it means something such as "unrecognized as exclusively standardized" for the unicode documentation; for, although the documentation states ".... and do not have defined, interpretable semantics except by private agreement." later in the unicode documentation it is stated ".... or they could be published as vendor-specific character assignments available to applications and end-users." The use of the word published to some extent contradicts the notion of private stated in ".... and do not have defined, interpretable semantics except by private agreement." for publication does not imply agreement and, at least in England, and perhaps elsewhere, publication of a matter makes it a matter of public interest.
end quote
Kenneth Whistler wrote as follows in response:
quote
This is a quibble about the usage of the terms "private" and "public". Any shared private use is by definition public. And of course, if you publish private usage of code points and encourage others to make use of your interpretation, that is even more public.
The point for the standardizing organizations is that the interpretation of private use code points is not *standardized* -- that is what makes them "private use" -- not whether there is any public, shared usage of particular "private" interpretations of PUA code points.
end quote
I respond as follows:
Well, I feel that it is not a quibble. The point that I was seeking to make is that the Unicode Consortium calls it a Private Use Area but once people start using such codes in public, then that usage is known to other people who may well, quite naturally, choose, out of a combination of courtesy and self interest and interoperability considerations, to try to avoid using the same "used" code points in the private use area, notwithstanding the rule that they need not bother at all to try to avoid clashes with other people's public usage of the private use area. I feel that I have recognized an increasingly problematic situation and I am trying to make a suggestion within the unicode user community to do something about it. The fact that the unicode standard specifically envisages the publication of vendor-specific character assignments means that the problem that I am seeking to address is raised as a direct implication of the wording of the unicode standard.
Any shared private use is surely not necessarily by definition public. Two or more people might be devising some meanings for code points on a confidential basis and sharing documents using those code points with those meanings on a confidential basis, perhaps prior to making a patent application or perhaps keeping them confidential indefinitely as part of trade secret know how. The standards document states in the section about the private use area ".... or they could be published as vendor-specific character assignments available to applications and end-users." and later, refering to the sentence just quoted, states "an example of the latter case would be the assignment of a character code to a vendor-specific logo character such as Apple's apple character." Now, I do not know for certain, but I would imagine that Apple's apple character as the standard calls it may well be protected by various intellectual property rights, including copyright and registered trade mark status. It would thus appear that entirely within the standard a person could publish a list of meanings for codes in the private use area without the agreement of anybody and retain intellectual property rights in the meanings that he or she chooses to assign to those codes. Indeed, I am hoping to do this myself with my uniengine research and feel that it would be entirely within the unicode specification to publish them in a document and perhaps to try to start a small business on the basis of trying to sell licences to software companies to include in their software the meanings that I devise for those codes.
William Overington
24 April 2001
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Jul 06 2001 - 00:17:16 EDT