From: "Jim Allan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > But if, in your opinion Theban and 3of9 bar code is on the cipher side > of a line and Ewellic is on the other side I would like to know the > logic on which this line is drawn.
I think that the line is drawn between scripts used to communicate between sentient peoples, and scripts created for personal use without intent to communicate with somebody else which can interpret it without the necessary help of the first writer, or scripts intended for communications with automated systems (such as BarCodes). A script used to communicate will inherently be not owned by the author of the text. It is a common knowledge shared by a community, and is open to any other people that just want to learn it to communicate in his language or culture or personal convention or to transmit knowledge across time or to store information on automated systems. Well I don't say that scripts that don't adhere to this definition must not be encoded in Unicode (at least we have characters in Unicode such as symbols, that were coded simply because they are often found in texts written in a qualifying script, but these symbols have their own meaning or function, acting like punctuation or ideographs.) With that definition, BarCodes are not a script, as they're a technical convention (similar to the Unicode assignment of arbitrary numeric codepoints to characters) which in itself has no semantic, but is used to represent a script (or another) in order to be read by automated devices that will decode it to render it back as a character or something else. Also Barcodes have strict technical glyph constraints which do not qualify them as abstract characters.
