On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 2:35 PM, Andreas Stötzner <[email protected]> wrote: > One *can* review e.g. the signage repertoire of, lat’s say, ten or 15 major > airports. Or of a dozen of major touristic guides. Or the sports pictograms > of the Olympics of the last 50 years. – Survey. And one *can* extract from > such a survey a reasonable choice of characters which then represents a good > and comprehensive set which will serve well for communication needs of the > kind in the future. (a set that is for many more useful than one > “Bingodings” or the like :-)
And what you'll run into is the fact that people don't agree that that belongs in Unicode. A lot of that is not exactly plain text. Are there really a lot of cases where the signage repertoire of an airport should be stored in plain text instead of links to vector image files? I don't see airports sending "⛖ People mover to section four" to their signmakers instead of peoplemover.eps "People mover to section four". And pictograms aren't a closed set. It's not possible to find a set of sport pictograms that will serve well for communication needs of the kind in the future. The 2014 Olympics are adding 12 new events. The 2020 Olympics is considering 6 new sports, "baseball, karate, roller sports, softball, sports climbing, squash, wakeboard and wushu". The Wingdings and Emoji were both sets that had proven plain text use as consistent sets. Like them, hate them, they were actually in use. -- Kie ekzistas vivo, ekzistas espero.
