Robert Palais wrote: > Which seems to make Unicode a defender of the status quo. Inaction is > as political as action. "We are holders of the standards > for the technology for encoding symbols, and we won't admit > new symbols > until they are widely used..." not necessarily the intent, > but possibly > the impact - that evolution of symbolic communication will be > hampered?
Definitely hampered, if not entirely blocked. But I tend to think that this is rather a general consequence of having a well defined repertoire of characters, rather than a definite policy of Unicode. With traditional means such as pen and paper, we were free to invent and immediately use any kind of new or altered graphical symbols. When typography started, this freedom was definitely reduced, because all new symbols required ahead planning and control over the lead type producers. With computers, each symbol has to be recognized in advance and identified with a numeric code before it can be used. And each time a new symbol is added to the code, all computers worldwide must be aware of it. So, now, the freedom of inventing new signs is at its historical minimum. And, yes: how the list of existing "characters" is managed, and who does it, and following which criteria, has now become a new little problem of democracy! By some points of view, however, Unicode has been designed to be a little bit more "democratic" than many other computer character sets that existed before. It contains a couple of relatively "subversive" features that, in theory, grant a minimum of freedom: 1) Combining characters (such as accents or diacritic modifiers) which allow modifying existing characters in a limited but significant number of ways. (But there also are pre-composite combination such as "�", so most platforms did not bother implement them). 2) A large "Private Use Areas" (PUA) which contains characters whose interpretation is not defined a priori, and that can be used for encoding symbols not otherwise present in the standard. (But there is the problem of how to privately agree with other users on the meaning of these slots, and you must be in control of fonts and rendering engine in order to display your characters). 3) A newly added "operator" (ZWL) which allows joining two characters into a single unit. (But I don't know of any implementation of this, and it is not supposed to generate new visual symbols, however). 4) A set of "operators" called Ideographic Description Character (IDC) for specifying the shape of Chinese ideographs which are not part of the standard. (But Unicode merely "permits" rendering such expressions as if they were actual Chinese ideographs: there is no obligation to do so and, consequently, no implementations exist, as far as I know). These are all small things, compared to the freedom allowed by paper and pen, but you must consider that the computer technology we have been used so far doesn't even grant these. _ Marco
