Patrick Andries wrote: << I wonder sometimes if the largest obstacle in the encoding of smileys as characters is not the "universal" normalization process itself. Had they been invented a few decades ago and encoded "locally" in some kind of popular font/encoding (the Netscape font for example that could have the iconic :-) :-( ;-) :-P :-D :-[ :-\ found in Messenger) they might have been included in Unicode without much further ado. I personnaly see them as punctuation mark (albeit not of "metaprosodic" nature).>>
Patrick, There are whole scripts for contemporary languages which are as yet unencoded in the Unicode Standard and some punctuation and other chararacters missing from already encoded scripts. IMO attention needs to be paid to making sure all these characters are encoded before we start bothering with Klingon, smileys, & etc. All the "smiley" characters you need could perhaps be encoded by using one of the existing two plus one of the variant selector characters. If you really think they are some sort of important modern day "punctuation" then document it, make a formal proposal and follow it through. - Chris -- Christopher J Fynn DDC Dzongkha Computing Project PO Box 122, Thimphu, Bhutan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
