On 2015/06/04 17:03, Chris wrote:
I wish Steve Jobs was here to give this lecture.
Well, if Steve Jobs were still around, he could think about whether (and how many) users really want their private characters, and whether it was worth the time to have his engineers working on the solution. I'm not sure he would come to the same conclusion as you.
This whole discussion is about the fact that it would be technically possible to have private character sets and private agreements that your OS downloads without the user being aware of it. Now if the unicode consortium were to decide on standardising a technological process whereby rendering engines could seamlessly download representations of custom characters without user intervention, no doubt all the vendors would support it, and all the technical mumbo jumbo of installing privately agreed character sets would be something users could leave for the technology to sort out.
You are right that it would be strictly technically possible. Not only that, it has been so for 10 or 20 years.
As an example, in 1996 at the WWW Conference in Paris I was participating in a workshop on internationalization for the Web, and by chance I was sitting between the participant from Adobe and the participant from Microsoft. These were the main companies working on font technology at that time, and I asked them how small it would be possible to make a font for a single character using their technologies (the purpose of such a font, as people on this thread should be able to guess, would be as part of a solution to exchange single, "user-defined" characters).
I don't even remember their answers. The important thing here that the idea, and the technology, have been around for a long time. So why didn't it take on? Maybe the demand is just not as big as some contributors on this list claim.
Also, maybe while the technology itself isn't rocket science, the responsible people at the relevant companies have enough experience with technology deployment to hold back. To give an example of why the deployment aspect is important, there were various Web-like hypertext technologies around when the Web took off in the 1990. One of them was called HyperG. It was technologically 'better' than the Web, in that it avoided broken links. But it was much more difficult to deploy, and so it is forgotten, whereas the Web took off.
Regards, Martin.
