On Sat, Mar 16, 2002 at 07:32:19AM +0900, Dan Kogai wrote: > On Saturday, March 16, 2002, at 06:32 , David Starner wrote: > >So people can't get work done, and poets are silenced because of > >politics. The very concept is something to which I object most strongly. > > To me such poets who give up their work just because a > (government|corporate|industrial) standard stands in a way is not an > artist enough.
So the guy who makes his money as an insurance agent, but writes elvish poetry at night, and wants to send it to people who would understand his inner elf, doesn't matter, because he's not artist enough. No, to be artist means you must fight with arbitrary limitations of your tools. > But that does not necessarily mean that Unicode or any standard must > give in to a particular art of work. If standards listen to every > single artist there would not be any standard at all. It's not a single artist. It's a script and language that are actually being studied and published in, more so than several scripts that are currently in the standard. You also started this out by complaining that Ciao-Ciao's poetry was unencodable. Why is this single artist important, and others not? > Standards don't > have a luxury of freedom that art does. Standards are for needs, Arts > are for wants. Needs? ASCII is for needs. You can do all the communication you want with ASCII, you can even nicely typeset books in most languages in ASCII (hello, TeX). Why are you wasting your time with Unicode? Unicode's goal is to to encode all of humanity's text; to let anyone communicate in thier choice of language or languages. Is there any text that Gothic or Deseret or Shavian or Linear B or Runic or Ogham that we _need_? Not really - it's all obscure academic uses or people playing around. Should Unicode not have encoded them? -- David Starner - [EMAIL PROTECTED] "It's not a habit; it's cool; I feel alive. If you don't have it you're on the other side." - K's Choice (probably refering to the Internet)
