From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Thu Jan 26 2006 - 14:57:46 CST
Dominikus Scherkl said:
> But 5.0 will not contain the egyptian hieroglyphs - not even all
> the "green" blocks from the roadmap, and the hieroglyphs are
> merely "blue". The Roadmap is not realy appropriate to guess when
> a script will be added to the unicode. This is sad and somehow
> contrary to what one might expect from a roadmap.
Actually, when correctly used, the Roadmap *is* appropriate
to guess when a script will be added to the Unicode Standard.
It just doesn't have the temporal granularity you might be
looking for. The *appropriate* use of the Roadmap is:
Black: The script is already standardized and published.
Green: The script is approved and in some stage of ballotting,
and will be published "soon".
[In its current status, by the way, all "Green" scripts are
slated for Unicode 5.0, except Lepcha, Ol Chiki, Vai,
and Saurashtra, which are not as far along in their ballotting
process.]
Blue: The script has a more or less complete proposal under
formal consideration, so has a reasonable chance of getting
to the point of approval and starting ballotting in the
relatively near future (but not "soon").
Red: We know about these, and a preliminary proposal document
might exist, but so far this is going nowhere, and don't
expect an approved encoding any time soon.
Trying to make further levels of distinctions here, or to add
finer granularity of date projections would, in my opinion,
just lead to maintenance difficulty (and errors), without
materially improving the function of the roadmap.
For people who are concerned about a closer tracking of
the status of various proposals for script encoding, and
which ballots they are in, and what dues dates are involved
for their processing, the appropriate tools are:
A. The Pipeline Table
http://www.unicode.org/alloc/Pipeline.html
B. Approved UTC Minutes
http://www.unicode.org/consortium/utc-minutes.html
C. Approved WG2 Minutes, which can be found in the WG2 documents
http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/
> Also very sad is, that the proposals which lead to the addition
> of new characters are not public available once the characters
> are added. Why is this so?
As Michael Everson indicated, these are usually available on
his website and/or the WG2 document registry. (See above.)
They must, however, be used with great caution, as there are
often significant changes to the proposals during committee
review, so that the final approved encoding may be quite
different from what was proposed in detail.
> I would very much appreciate a "map" like the roadmap with
> links to those proposals instead of the code-charts.
--Ken
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