On 26/05/13 23:37, Michael Everson wrote:
On 26 May 2013, at 23:15, David Starner <[email protected]> wrote:
Problems from Unicode generally come from of two places; compatibility with
non-Unicode data sets, and people with different goals working on it. For
pictographs, when Google comes forth saying this is the set we need supported,
that was the set they needed supported for compatibility.
And then experts in symbols from Germany and Ireland said "We'll accept this
incomplete set but we insist on some additions so that the set makes better sense."
And that gave us what we have.
For instance, the Japanese telco sets had nearly, but not all, the animals in
the Asian Zodiacs. The encoded set has all of them however. That's way better
than it would have been had we just accepted Google's minimal request.
Goals can not be decided in an scientific way, and there are many people who
have the goals for Unicode to support text, and not to support an arbitrary set
of pictographs.
In my experience I have learned that splitters win out over lumpers. Often it
takes a long time due to the stubbornness of the lumpers.
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/
The Noun Project seem determined to create a pictogram for every noun,
and many short phrases:
See http://blog.thenounproject.com/
I don't have any statistics about how far they've got to date, but I
would imagine that this project is likely to generate at least some tens
of thousands of pictograms, just in the near term.
-- N.
