From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Fri Nov 24 2006 - 10:44:48 CST
Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer at nic dot fr> wrote:
> AFAIK, that would be a *big* policy change for Unicode. Until now, you
> just needed to demonstrate an actual *use*. Now, you would need to
> demonstrate a *widespread* use? Such an policy, applied a few years
> ago, would have seriously reduced the size of the Unicode set.
>
> For instance, N'ko would never have been encoded (it is just used by a
> few activists).
I think the criteria are different for symbols as opposed to characters
used as part of an actual writing system (alphabet, abjad, syllabary,
etc.). It's always been my assumption that the bar is higher for
symbols, because of the greater potential for symbols to be ad-hoc and
ephemeral, and the (often) less compelling need for these by comparison
with "writing system" characters used to write a person's name, laws,
religious works, etc.
The "Principles and Procedures" document written by WG2 makes several
references to the notion of whether a proposed symbol is "widespread" or
"widely used."
http://www.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC2/WG2/docs/n3002.pdf
> Encoding requests are very often accompanied by political statements
> (the N'ko is, again, a good example). Unicode should be about the
> facts (charecters in use), not about what you think of the political
> agenda of the people who request it.
One question to ask might be, "Has the proposed character seen
significant use outside the group that invented it, or those directly
influenced by that group?" (I think "significant" might be a safer
choice than "widespread.") We might ask ourselves that question about
(a) the N'Ko script and (b) the Creative Commons symbols.
-- Doug Ewell * Fullerton, California, USA * RFC 4645 * UTN #14 http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/ http://www1.ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages
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