On Fri, 18 Jan 2002, Kenneth Whistler wrote: > > The two points below raise the question to me, is popularity/use > > the criterion or not. > ^^^ > Presuppositional error. These encoding decisions are not made on the > basis of a single, axiomatic criterion.
Well, I was merely responding TO the contention that because it is not popular, we cannot accept it. I did not believe it was the actual criterion, or that there was only one. But your elaboration on the criteria, charter, and background have been most enjoyable. James Kass wrote: >Has there been any consideration of practical alternatives, such as >selecting a lookalike or similar character from the plethora of those >already encoded and promoting its use to represent the "newpi" >character? My own proposal was a pictogram: A circle with a radius to "3 o'clock", i.e. from 0 to 1 in the complex number plane. Pacman with mouth closed. Does that already exist in Unicode? :-) My dad's version is a lot more palatable for most people. For any of you interested in the evolution of mathematical symbols, I highly recommend A History of Mathematical Notations, by Florian Cajori, 1929, both volumes recently reprinted as one Dover paperback. http://store.doverpublications.com/by-subject-mathematics.html and Kenneth Whistler wrote: >Ooh, throwing red meat to the lions! >When speaking of status quo ante, it is important to keep in mind the >perspective you have on the matter. >The status quo for most Unicode developers was the existence of a large, >and proliferating collection of overlapping, incomplete, and only >partially interoperable character encodings (numbering in the multiple >hundreds) that made internationalization engineering a mess and which >resulted in countless opportunities for data corruption when attempting >to operate in a global information context. Furthermore, many useful >characters, including some national scripts and many minority and >historic scripts, were completely unrepresentable in any significant >character encoding standard, and required local hacks based on fonts, >typically non-communicable in email, on the web, or in common document >formats. and > Popularity, per se, is generally not a good criterion, though it > depends in part on the nature of the constituency. Certainly, > for example, the Klingon script had a certain passion and popularity > among its supporters, but it failed of other criteria for being > suitable for encoding. But "popularity" among the voting members > of the UTC and the active voting members of WG2 is absolutely > vital. > > The existence of well-documented proposals, and the presence of > advocates -- especially advocates who have clout (earned or unearned) -- > in the relevant standards committees is also a factor. And just > plain horsetrading during resolution of national body ballot comments > during ISO voting is also a factor. Lots of things that probably > shouldn't be characters got to be encoded as characters that way. > > The mission of Unicode is to provide an enumerated set of characters > sufficient to represent the vast majority of what is (or was) in > regular use in writing systems and character-like symbol systems > of the world, so that IT systems can be used to process, store and > render them. > > If and when the copyleft symbol and/or \newpi rise far enough above > the noise level to demonstrate validity for encoding on one (or > better, many) of the kinds of criteria listed above, then the > UTC is likely to quickly encode it/them as characters.
