Tailoring the Marketplace (is: Re: Unicode Emoji 5.0 characters now final)

On Thu, 30 Mar 2017 15:03:11 +0100 (BST), William_J_G Overington wrote:
>
> > What the UTC is looking for is commitments from major vendors.
>
> Well should it be applying such a filter on progress?
>
> I opine that assessment should be on merit and that new ideas should be
> considered on an even-handed basis. Progress should not be on the basis of
> what major vendors choose to do. Requiring commitments from major vendors
> could be a barrier to new enterprises developing and a barrier to progress
> for the benefit of consumers being made.

Thatʼs exactly the point: that the marketplace should be tailored for the
benefit of consumers, not for the sole benefit of vendors. Instead, the
question seems always to be “who is paying for it?” Another example has been
recently discussed: the use of superscript letters is “discouraged”, seemingly
to prevent a set of consumers from being able to write in an acceptable way a
couple of languages in plain text, and to subjugate these customers to the use
of a series of rich text software. The problem is not whether to use high-end
software or not, but the way how users get their stuff messed up if they donʼt.

When it was up to encode the first set of superscript Latin letters in
Unicode 1.0 — or were they *too* enforced by Bruce Paterson of ISO/IEC 10646? —
all straightforward people surely were going to follow the pattern of:

2071 SUPERSCRIPT LATIN SMALL LETTER I
* functions as a modifier letter
# <super> 0069
207F SUPERSCRIPT LATIN SMALL LETTER N
* functions as a modifier letter
# <super> 006E
@ Latin subscript modifier letters
1D62 LATIN SUBSCRIPT SMALL LETTER I
# <sub> 0069
1D63 LATIN SUBSCRIPT SMALL LETTER R
# <sub> 0072
1D64 LATIN SUBSCRIPT SMALL LETTER U
# <sub> 0075
1D65 LATIN SUBSCRIPT SMALL LETTER V
# <sub> 0076

and name them accordingly. But given the way of finally calling them:

@@ 02B0 Spacing Modifier Letters 02FF
@ Latin superscript modifier letters
x (superscript latin small letter i - 2071)
x (superscript latin small letter n - 207F)
02B0 MODIFIER LETTER SMALL H
* aspiration
# <super> 0068
02B1 MODIFIER LETTER SMALL H WITH HOOK

and so on, somebody must have arisen telling “Wait! if we label them as what they
are, folks will use these instead of our software, so letʼs disguise them a bit!”
As a result, weʼve ended up with every script on earth being writeable in plain
text except Latin. That seems to be an abuse of dominant position, to make an
unknown amount of more bargain at the expense of a relatively narrow subset of
disfavored end-users, as if the usefulness of vendorsʼ software would essentially
depend on one single feature: superscript formatting.

Regards,
Marcel
Received on Thu Mar 30 2017 - 14:07:58 CDT