On 07/05/2002 03:00:35 PM Marco Cimarosti wrote:
>David Possin wrote: >> But, if something it silently ignored, then somebody has discovered >> something that nobody wants to touch. I have observed this sevaral >> times now, the latest incident was in the Chromatic Font Research >> thread, with 2 cases: >> >> Aztec glyphs: [...] Silence. > >Funny. I interpreted that silence the opposite way: very positively. I >didn't expect any immediate action, and the absence of denials made me feel >the information I passed was not totally pointless. > >Anyway, even if the silence actually meant "Who cares?", it doesn't bother >me, because I think this is NOT an issue for Unicode... I think Marco has got this right. Let's suppose Aztec writing gets deciphered and there are cases of the same shape with different colouring to mean different things. Let's further suppose that we determine that the difference in semantics isn't akin to the ways in which colouring of English text might conceivably be used (e.g. for emphasis) but is really fundamental. Let's also further suppose that, taking all things into consideration, we really do consider this text and come to the conclusion that the best solution is one that's purely text-based (i.e. no markup or other higher-level protocal). We're nowhere near having made all these conclusions, but let's just suppose. So, we identify two things that are minimally contrastive: a red-and-white-whatsit, and a blue-green-and-yellow-whatsit. They are two entities and each gets a codepoint. That's an encoding issue. How they get rendered isn't an encoding issue. Of course, at that point, we'd be wanting to consider how to deal with chromatic issues in text rendering where chromaticity is inherent to the character and not a matter of user-discretion (for which formatting is appropriate). But we are not yet at the point of knowing that is even necessary. And since it would clearly not be a trivial problem to solve (it's not finding a way to do it that's hard -- it's the huge amount of secondary implications), I think the silence amounts to a reaction that we neither are ready to cross that bridge nor do we need to at this time -- in fact, it's not yet certain that we will ever need to -- and that in the mean time there are more immediate and real concerns to be dealt with. - Peter --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Peter Constable Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International 7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA Tel: +1 972 708 7485 E-mail: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
