On Wed, May 29, 2013 at 1:39 AM, Andreas Stötzner <[email protected]> wrote: > > Am 29.05.2013 um 01:06 schrieb David Starner: > > A lot of that is not exactly plain text. … > > Many are and that is easily to testify.
Airport signs are not plain text, by any definition. > Come on, don’t be more catholic than the pope. That is very scholarly of you. I will point out that's exactly what I was saying, that the problems aren't scholarly ones, they're questions of goals. >> And pictograms aren't a closed set. > > Of course not. But again, this is not a convincing case against doing it. > Emoji aren’t closed sets either. I can’t remember any Unicode rule that only > “closed sets” are eligible. > This is not the point. If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Open sets are problematic for Unicode because any particular version of Unicode is a closed set, and new characters are added in a process that takes years. If you have a set of symbols, and 3 out of the 5 are in Unicode, you're better off encoding all of them as vector graphics, instead of encoding three of them in text and two in graphics and trying to get the looks to match up. > > 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". > > > And yet there is still football, swimming, running, rowing, basketball, … > all very useful. > Would you never consider these just because other sorts are to be expected > in the future? That's moving the goal posts. We're going from finding "a set of sport pictograms that will serve well for communication needs of the kind in the future" to grabbing a set that will work today... and in practice not even today, unless the Unicode consortium scurries to keep up with whatever the Olympics is doing several years in the future, to give everyone lead time to support the new characters. >> The Wingdings and Emoji were both sets that had proven plain text use >> as consistent sets. > > > No this is not true and you possibly know that. You think somewhere some part of those sets weren't used? Availability is a huge factor in use. As a group, it's pretty clear they were being used. Individually, it's hard to believe that no internal Word document anywhere can be found that uses any particular Wingdings character, and I bet even webusage is pretty easy to find. -- Kie ekzistas vivo, ekzistas espero.
