At 06:07 PM 3/16/02 +0200, Sampo Syreeni wrote: >If such a bottleneck has formed inside Unicode Consortium and/or ISO, we >have to wonder whether those organizations have the requisite capacity to >manage a standard as important as Unicode. If the bottleneck is in lacking >proposals, this cannot be used as a reason not to include synthetic >scripts which *do* have a standing proposal.
Like all organizations, neither Unicode nor ISO have infinite resources. Unlike other organizations the work is done on a voluntary basis. In other words, rather than evaluate whether the organizations are the right ones, what you should evaluate is whether you (and others interested in particular outcomes) should contribute to the work being done. A second limit seems to exist in the rate in which the larger community of users and implementors of the standard can absorb changes, where changes does include the addition of new scripts. Many detail issues are only discovered once suppport for a given script is wide-spread enough for theory to have to withstand the test of a messy practice. Without discovering these detail issues, the encodings - however well intentioned - will indeed remain theories. I have no advice on how the rate of implementation can be changed to speed up that part of the process. However, the discovery of detail issues that need to be sorted out with character properties and guidelines (or, sometimes, additions of characters) itself takes bandwidth out of the coding committees. In practice this means that the process of fine-tuning the encoding of any script is a doubly limited process. Due to the fact that so many living scripts have been encoded for over a decade, the process of fine-tuning these is in full swing and is already taking up a large percentage of the committees' time and effort. Within limits, additional contributors could ease the burden for the existing team. as I have indicated above. However, adding manpower itself, initially takes away from the bandwidth - it is therefore not a short term solution. In the longer term, it would be very desirable to have more volunteers that are actively involved in the support of non-living scripts, not just on the philological side, but also on the technical side. The surest way, by the way, to bring the work to a complete and screeching halt is to entertain the idea of moving the work to a different team altogether and starting from scratch in a new environment. The subject matter is complex and interdependent enough that there is no need to make the work ten times more difficult by removing 'institutional memory' and replacing well-tested processes and patterns of cooperation with reinventing the wheel. A./
