Kenneth Whistler wrote at 10:35 AM on Tuesday, January 20, 2004: >Dean Snyder asserted: > >> >No, we do not need to rehearse the pros and cons of the "dynamic" >> >model for Cuneiform already. Abundant evidence for why it has not >> >been chosen has already been presented. >> >> But NO ONE mentioned free variation selectors in the discussion until >> yesterday. > >This is not the case. *I* mentioned free variation selectors >during both of the ICE meetings. They weren't discussed at any >great length, precisely because I and the other encoding experts >did not feel that they were applicable to the basic encoding issues >of Cuneiform.
Sorry I missed your mention of them at the ICE conferences. But I was referring to their not being mentioned in these fairly extensive email discussions on dynamic cuneiform over the last month. And, to my knowledge, this is the first time we've actually discussed the issue to any depth. >They may have a place in some future refinement of Cuneiform, but >only for representation of notable variants of the *statically* >encoded list of base signs, *not* for the kind of dynamic sign >building that you have been advocating. I don't want to burden your time, but I do not understand the technical resistance to this. I know there are implementation complexities, time to market issues, costs, etc. And these are indeed real considerations. But I do not see the TECHNICAL reasons against it, especially when it is already being used for somewhat similar purposes. An aside: How does Hangul jamo relate to all of this? From a quick reading of chapter 11.4 of The Unicode Standard it sounds similar to what I am thinking about dynamic cuneiform. Thanks. 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
