On Wednesday 31 August 2011, Doug Ewell <[email protected]> wrote:
> Coming back full circle, this is where many of the PUA protests on this list
> come from -- some folks want to use the Unicode PUA to encode things that are
> not characters, not even glyphs or symbols, nor anything else remotely
> resembling the intended scope of the Unicode Standard.
Well, some of my ideas for which I am using the Private Use Areas have been
banned from being discussed in this mailing list.
Yet that is mailing list policy, not the policy over for what a person may use
the Private Use Areas.
The two are not the same.
There is a ban on discussing the ideas in this list, yet I am entirely free to
use the Private Use Area for assigning meanings within the scope that those
meanings are Private Use meanings, publishing those meanings within the scope
that those meanings are Private Use meanings and making and publishing fonts
and producing and publishing pdfs as I choose and to continue my research.
The intended scope of the Unicode Standard is something that can change with
time.
Research is about progress. What is in the Unicode Standard should not be
constrained to what was intended to be in the Unicode Standard many years ago
when the Unicode Standard was started. Certainly, there are some things that
cannot be changed, yet not changing those things is not the same as restricting
what the Unicode Standard can encode in the future. There have been various
technological developments since the Unicode Standard was started and the scope
of the Unicode Standard has been enlarged to support those new technologies.
For example, the encoding of the emoji and now the encoding-in-progress of the
symbols of the Webdings font.
In relation to the encoding-in-progress of the symbols of the Webdings font,
something I have wondered about is whether the encoding is for the specific
Webdings glyphs or whether the encoding is for any representation of the same
general concept.
As a particular example, please consider the character that is accessed by the
letter P using the Webdings font. I have seen that glyph used in a gif attached
to an email along with text suggesting helping the environment by avoiding
printing the email unless it is considered essential to do so.
In another post Doug wrote as follows.
> I don't know what this means. Private-use tags starting with "x-" cannot be
> reliably and algorithmically parsed into subtags (just like all language tags
> before RFC 4646), but there are no real limits to what language information
> can be conveyed in them, as you seem to imply; you can write
> "x-navi-as-spoken-in hometree-on-pandora" if you like.
I am using x-y as a language tag for some of my research. For example, there
could be a database table for x-y and en-gb-oed sentences and another database
table for x-y and fr sentences. One could then seek matches in the x-y fields
in each table so as to find a link from a en-gb-oed sentence to a fr sentence.
The method is suitable not only for French, there could be a database table for
x-y and any other language tag, as desired.
William Overington
1 September 2011
