I realized that I should probably turn an off-list discussion back to the list, as it's illustrating an area of difficulty. (See the bottom of this note for a partial discussion of what writing systems could/would be considered.)
In the "appropriate use" FAQ entry, how the heck can we state what is and isn't a suitable writing system for inclusion? Fictional scripts in some cases would be considered, in other cases would not. Historical scripts would in some cases be considered, in other cases not. Can people from the review committee give me some hard and fast rules for when something is thrown out? Is there some way of listing or detailing the criteria in a way which potential readers could determine where theire script or character stands? It could perhaps be presented in a table or matrix form, so that people could look through the criteria and say "yep, it's fictional, yep people currently use it, no, there are no fonts yet" etc. Or maybe a decision tree would be better, where the criteria forks. I guess the first thing I need to collect is the criteria... Here are some starters to get the ball rolling: --Is this an entire script or additions to an existing script? --Is the script fictional? --Is the script in use? (as determined how???) --Does the character(s) already exist in some other part of the standard? --Is there a compelling reason for including a characther which would normally not be considered, due to legacy support issues? --Is the character a precomposed ligature which can be encoded using a sequence of existing character (possibly joined by ZWJ's)? --Is the character a precomposed "accented character" which can be composed using an existing character and one or more existing combining diacritics? --Is the character a clone of an existing character whose sole purpose is making a *logical* differentiation from some existing characters (e.g., hex digits looking identical to existing characters "0..9" and "A...F"; or a symbol for "meter" looking identical to Latin "m")? --Is the chracter a clone of an existing character whose sole purpose is making a *graphical* differentiation from some existing characters (e.g., a Serbian letter "t", disunified from Russian on the basis that italics looks different in the two languages)? --Is the character really a presentation glyph for a shape that can be obtained using regular characters in conjunction with ZWJ or ZWNJ? Again, additions, suggestions, or other help appreciated, Suzanne -----Original Message----- At 15:35 -0400 2002-07-02, Suzanne M. Topping wrote: >Apologies, I was sloppy with my phrasing; of course a script is >"written". What I really meant was that the script is in current use in >some sort of written form, as opposed to existing somewhere, >historically, without being in current use. Fiction is written within history. Jonathan Swift made up an alphabet once I think in Gulliver's Travels. But it exists only in that book. Tengwar is different. > > It has to be used by people who want to interchange data safely with >> it. Tengwar meets this criterion. Klingon didn't. > >Is there some sort of metric associated with the concept of "people who >want..."? Is there some sort of a threshhold of number of people? Certainly not. The number of users of Old Permic, for instance, is probably a few dozen or less -- specialists. That doesn't mean Old Permic doesn't deserve encoding. Numbers aren't really in the criteria. --
