Michael Everson wrote at 8:20 PM on Sunday, January 18, 2004: >I do NOT believe that this thread should be discussed on the Unicode >List.
Why would you want to restrict the discussion of shaping format characters and free variation selectors to a list populated mostly by cuneiformists but exclude feedback from a list populated mostly by encoding experts? >At 14:13 -0500 2004-01-18, Dean Snyder wrote: > >>It took Devanagiri to show me the NATURE of the technical problem posed >>by a dynamic encoding for cuneiform; it took Mongolian to show me that >>the problem HAS ALREADY BEEN SOLVED in Unicode. > >No greater hames have we ever made than encoding Mongolian without a >proper implementation model. But go ahead, Dean, engage in yet >another flight of fancy. In what sense are you using "hames" as a description of Mongolian in Unicode? What specifically is "improper" about the implementation of Mongolian in Unicode? And what about it is a "flight of fancy" as applied to cuneiform? >Variation selectors are not the joyous answer to Dean's prayers. >Variation selectors are, in fact, a vexatious and nasty form of >pseudo-coding which pretty much sucks, except maybe for >mathematicians. What is it about variation selectors that has proven "vexatious and nasty" in Mongolian? >>Thus there is NO technical reason in Unicode for jettisoning a dynamic >>model for cuneiform. And this is exactly the kind of technical >>information I have been looking for all along on these email lists. > >There is every technical reason for refusing a "dynamic" model for >Unicode. It is a bad idea. >This has been explained, politely and not >so politely, to Dean, who persists in annoying everyone by waving his >hands and ignoring the opinions both of authors of the Unicode >Standard and of other cuneiformists. > >The "dynamic" is inferior to the "static" model we have chosen. Making these broad, sweeping, and sometimes bombastic statements simply does not make them so. >We >chose the model years ago, for good reason, not least the ease of >timely and simple font provision. How long does it take to create a Mongolian font, compared to, let's say, a Hebrew one? >The static model we have chosen is >good enough for 70,000 Han characters, and the dynamic model is not >good enough for any of them. The same shall apply for Cuneiform. There is no comparison between Han and cuneiform in either the complexity of glyph formation or in the shear number of ideographs. >Dean wanted to use control characters, then ligators, and now >variation selectors in order to glue characters together to make >other characters. >... >No gluing. No splicing. No alternate format characters. No ligator >characters. And no variation selectors. Terminology is not the issue here. For a month I have been asking for technical information on this issue because I am not an encoding expert. I made use of terms of my own choosing because none were proffered by anyone else. All the terms I used referred to same concept. If you knew about "free variation selectors" a month ago, why did you not let all of us encoding non-experts know about them? I would have been glad to use the Unicode terminolgy you are all used to using if I had only known about it. Respectfully, Dean A. Snyder Assistant Research Scholar Manager, Digital Hammurabi Project Computer Science Department Whiting School of Engineering 218C New Engineering Building 3400 North Charles Street Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21218 office: 410 516-6850 www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi
