From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Mon Aug 29 2005 - 19:22:51 CDT
On 29/08/2005 19:11, Kenneth Whistler wrote:
>>And of course technical symbols (like the worldwide spread play, pause,
>>skip, etc.)
>>need to be exchanged electronically in plain text.
>>
>>
>
>There are standards for this kind of thing... even ISO
>standards. See, for example:
>
>http://usabilitynet.org/trump/resources/standards.htm#11581
>
>which gives a capsule summary of ISO/IEC 11581 "Icon symbols and
>functions."
>
>*That* is the relevant ISO standard for these things -- not
>ISO/IEC 10646 "Information Technology -- Universal Multiple-Octet
>Coded Character Set (UCS)."
>
>A few of these doo-dads have gotten encoded as characters in
>the Unicode Standard for a variety of reasons, but nobody
>really wants to start down the road of standardizing every
>iconic element printed on equipment somewhere as *characters*.
>
>
>
But surely, Ken, in saying that 10646 is not the relevant standard for
these icons you are implying that there is no requirement to exchange
these icons in text. On the other hand, people have given evidence of
such requirements, for example in instruction manuals. So, I wonder, is
there in fact any good reason for not encoding these icons in
Unicode/10646 as well, with mappings to and from 11581 as with many
other ISO standards? After all, we are apparently talking about less
than 100 officially standardised icons, and there is no technical
problem with including them - not necessarily in the BMP.
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/ -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.344 / Virus Database: 267.10.16/83 - Release Date: 26/08/2005
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