William_J_G Overington <wjgo underscore 10009 at btinternet dot com> wrote:
> What I was wondering about was whether if someone proposes U+E0002 for > encoding for a future new technology, whether the fact that tags are > currently deprecated would automatically stop that proposal being > accepted for encoding because of perhaps some guarantee in the rules > never to reverse deprecation or something like that. These are my personal opinions. Please keep in mind I am not a UTC or WG2 member, and have often been taken to task for trying to predict or advise people what UTC or WG2 will or will not do. 1. There is probably no formal provision for "automatic" rejection of a proposed new Plane 14 tag character. It would probably be at least considered, not thrown away at the receptionist's desk. 2. Both the act of formally deprecating the Plane 14 tag mechanism, and the comments I've seen on this list from UTC participants over the years, suggest to me that a proposal for a new Plane 14 tag character would be very unlikely to be approved. 3. Stating in a proposal that either this new tag character, or any character, is being proposed "for a future new technology" may reduce the likelihood that the proposal will be approved. But the only way to find out for sure is to submit a proposal. > Thinking about this after posting and thinking of the vast coding > space that could be opened up for flag encoding by just adding U+E0002 > into regular Unicode, I began to think of the possibility of proposing > the addition of U+E0007 so as to open up another encoding space where > each item in that encoding space could be displayed either as a > sequence of tag glyphs using an ordinary font, or displayed as one > glyph by using glyph substitution technology with an advanced format > font or displayed localized using a database technology with the item > in that encoding space used as a key to the database. My opinion is that nothing about the Unicode code space, including Plane 14 tags, is intended to serve as an indexing mechanism into another standard. > I was thinking that the above would involve visible glyphs for the tag > characters. My opinion is that, while a font may include glyphs for tag characters, that is not the normal use case for tag characters. -- Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA http://www.ewellic.org | @DougEwell
