At 07:57 +0100 2002-06-27, William Overington wrote:
>Michael Everson wrote as follows.
>
>>I think, William, you ought to read the TR on the character-glyph
>>model many times because it's clear that you want to use character
>>encoding, even private-use character encoding, for things that have
> >nothing to do with character encoding.
>
>I have now had the opportunity to study the document.
>That was quick. Methinks it was overquick.
>In Annex B Characters there is the following definition for a character.
>
>quote
>
>A member of a set of elements used for the organisation, control, and
>representation of data.
>
>end quote
>
>There is then mention of data characters and control characters, including
>the use of the word usually.
>
>It seems to me from that definition that codes for 36 POINT and GREEN and so
>on are well within that definition.
Sorry, William, but you just aren't getting it.
>Indeed, that definition shows that codes such as 36 POINT and GREEN are but
>on the sea shore as far as goes what a character could be used to represent.
Green and 36-point are markup attibutes to be applied to real characters.
Please go back and try again. Our terminology is not full of
portmanteau words you can make mean whatever *you* like. This is a
game for which the rules have been developed with some rigour over
the years, and we try not to break them. We know that they have been
broken in the past. And we also know how to apply them and we've been
trying to tell you that you've been coming up with ideas that are so
far afield as to boggle the mind.
>Consider for example a code point for LET THERE BE A TRIANGLE and a code
>point for LET THERE BE A QUADRILATERAL and a code point for LET THE NEXT
>CLOCKWISE VERTEX BE REPRESENTED BY THE FOLLOWING SYMBOL (where any Unicode
>character can then be used to represent that vertex in that item) and so on.
>Codes such as JOIN THE PREVIOUSLY DESIGNATED VERTICES REPRESENTED BY THE
>FOLLOWING TWO SYMBOLS and so on could be defined, thus allowing a computer
>to produce a picture and also have a data structure which has knowledge of
>the mathematical structure of the picture.
William. This is ***NOT*** character encoding. It may be something
that you can do with a computer. That does not mean it has anything
to do with character encoding, fonts, or the Unicode Standard.
>It would seem that it would be entirely within the letter and the spirit of
>that definition to use code points in regular Unicode to denote all manner
>of items for human and computer communication. The potential uses for pure
>mathematics, artificial intelligence and psychology are enormous. Uses for
>computer aided design are also possible.
Don't even go there, William. This is NOT what character encoding is
for. Go back and read the TR again. And again. And again. Then go
read the Unicode Standard again. And again. And again. Then get a
book on writing systems. Not on semasiology or philosophy of font
design or any other such herring. You apparently have a lot of work
to do to get onto the same page as the rest of us are.
This is not an ad hominem attack. It is just a plea.
-- Michael Everson *** Everson Typography *** http://www.evertype.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Thu Jun 27 2002 - 04:26:15 EDT