Re: Suggestion for new dingbats/symbols

On 31/05/13 20:37, Asmus Freytag (w) wrote:
> I think that research that does precisely this kind of task of correlating symbol repertoires against each other is extremely valuable in its own right.
>
> Additional research that documents the usage of these symbols -- in computing environments -- would also be useful.
>
> Reliable facts on users and the tasks in which they use particular symbols (represented in filed and data) would be a better basis to argue about possible encodings than just the existence of symbols or whether they are highly recognizable when seen on signage.
>
> Having said that, documenting the details of ongoing efforts at understanding symbols by posting each small finding on this list is probably inappropriate. That kind of effort belongs in a research project aimed at symbols.
>
> A./
>

Thanks! I agree that a mailing list is a very poor venue for this -- I
just wanted to demonstrate that the repertoire of public information
symbols was quite coherent, and very amenable to unification, instead of
being a random grab-bag of pictograms with no defined boundaries -- and
then I got carried away.

ISO has its TC 145 committee to talk about exactly this, and no doubt
they will have a lot of this sewn up already, but it's not really a
public forum, and their documents are not freely available.

Is there an alternative forum that could be used to develop something in
a crowdsourced, collaborative way that could later be refined to
generate a more formal document such as a Unicode encoding proposal?
Something as simple as a wiki would work fine in the short term...

Neil
Received on Fri May 31 2013 - 15:28:01 CDT