From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Tue Sep 06 2005 - 19:51:02 CDT
At 17:14 -0700 2005-09-06, Kenneth Whistler wrote:
> > None of which is to say that interrobang isn't a bit silly,
>But attested, as well as encoded, so we live with it.
Lots of things in the standard we "live" with.
> > and inverted interrobang is even sillier.
>
>and basically unattested. All the attestations so far have
>been speculations about how it could or should be used, or
>jokes about how the silly interrobang would require an
>even sillier inverted interrobang in Spanish (har! har!), or
>claims based on implementations themselves based on spec
>(TeX).
Whether you *like* the attestations and implementations, well, I
guess is your business. The inverted critter is a fact. I didn't
invent it. (I have invented other things.)
>And don't give me silly garbage about people not being
>able to use it because it isn't encoded in Unicode.
The PUA is not an option. When I need to make fake fonts, I still
replace ASCII and Latin-1/MacRoman glyphs because that, at least,
works.
>John Hudson said:
>
>> Accepting this implied need and moving on seems a better
>> use of resources than investigating whether any Iberian
>> use is attested.
ANd he was right.
>and Patrick Andries responded:
>
>> Then the best solution is simply to drop the idea which has been
>> qualified as added silliness, methinks. I wonder why we still speak
>> about it.
Yeah, well, Patrick dislikes a lot of my ideas.
>In my opinion, the current path of least resistance is to drop it,
>as Patrick has suggested -- not least because there clearly will not
>be consensus to encode it in the absence of attestation or
>demonstrated need.
There's no harm in encoding this, and it *is* an example of the
application of systemic logic, and I have no problem supporting this
character at all.
Compared with truly useless things like Zapf's heart-shaped
exclamation mark, I can hardly think ill of the inverted interrobang.
-- Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com
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