Quoting Marco Cimarosti <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > Jon Hanna wrote: > > I refuse to rename my UTF-81920! > > Doug, Shlomi, there's a new one out there! > > Jon, would you mind describing it?
There are two different UTF-81920s (the resultant ambiguity is very much in the spirit of UTF-81920). The first is not only not a proper UTF, but it is not Unicode at all; rather it's science fiction. The expected lifetime of Unicode was mentioned a while back which set me thinking about what could go beyond Unicode and why. Hypothesising a massive increase in computing power, bandwidth and other technological limitations I imagined an expert system that could read a piece of text much as an expert in linguistics, typography, calligraphy and disciplines related to the text might. Two such systems would not communicate with each other only in terms of characters, but also in terms of descriptions of characters and so "c with a downwards-pointing triangle found in some Chumash text, possibly a fancified hacek, possibly something else" (from a recent post to this list) could be "encoded" so to speak. Since a detail description of a character, especially one that could not be reliably compared with a known character, could potentially be quite large I picked the figure of 10KB out of the air and hence UTF-81920! The second idea is a possibly practical one inspired by the above flight of fancy - of a Wiki or similar of information about the various characters encoded in Unicode, or proposed characters, or even a note on why the reserve code points U+2072 and U+2073 aren't superscript 2 and superscript 3, encoding histories and so on. I wouldn't be able to contribute to such a project (and most of those who would are very busy), but I'd certainly enjoy flicking through it if it existed. -- Jon Hanna <http://www.hackcraft.net/> *Thought provoking quote goes here*
