> At 01:57 PM 11/10/2003, Peter Kirk wrote: > > > Was it a whim that Theban > >and Klingon were rejected?
First of all, Theban hasn't been rejected. It has never formally been considered by either the UTC nor WG2 for character encoding. Why? Because it is so patently obvious that it is a Latin cipher: http://www.omniglot.com/writing/theban.htm And because there is consensus in both committees that encoding of the potentially very large number of arbitrary ciphers of Latin letters (and other scripts as well) is *not* appropriate for Unicode. This is not a "whim" -- it is a considered opinion and consensus among professional character encoders of long standing. And I don't see why it should be so difficult to just accept the obvious here. Asking the list to come up with an airtight and axiomatic definition of "cipher" which will satisfy all users of the term and apply unambiguously to every decision taken by the encoding committees is basically irrelevant to the decisions taken here: Theban is (obviously) a Latin cipher. Because of that, nobody (seriously) involved in 10646 or Unicode has bothered to try to provide a character encoding proposal for it. Even *if* someone did, both committees would summarily reject it, because they have clear consensus not to encode alphabet ciphers. Clear enough? As for the Klingon (con)script, it *was* formally proposed. It was not rejected on a "whim". It was rejected by formal motion, based on a document which cited a whole string of reasons why the Klingon (con)script should not be encoded. http://www.unicode.org/consortium/utc-minutes/UTC-087-200105.html The vote, after discussion in the committee, was 9 for, 0 against, with one abstention. Sounds like technical consensus to me. --Ken
