Doug Ewell wrote: > Martin J. Dürst wrote: >> Please enjoy. Sorry for being late with forwarding, at least in some >> parts of the world. > Unfortunately, we know some folks will look past the humor and use this as a springboard for the recurring theme "Yes, what *will* we do when Unicode runs out of code points?"
An interesting thing about the document is that it suggests a Unicode code point for an individual item of a particular type, what the document terms an imoji. This being beyond what Unicode encodes at present. I wondered if this could link in some ways to the Internet of Things. I had never heard of IPv6. Indeed I checked on the Internet to find whether that was real. So I have started reading and learning. It would, in fact, be quite straightforward to encode what the document terms 128-bit Unicode characters. For example, U+FFF8 could be used as a base character and then followed by a sequence of 32 tag characters, each of those 32 tag characters being from the range U+E0030 TAG DIGIT ZERO .. U+E0039 TAG DIGIT NINE, U+E0041 TAG LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A .. U+E0046 TAG LATIN CAPITAL LETTER F That is, a newly-defined character from the Specials and then 32 tag characters encoding a hexadecimal code point. Now, if that were called 128-bit Unicode then there could be problems of policy, but if it were given another name so that it sits upon a Unicode structure so as to provide an application platform that can be manipulated using Unicode tools, including existing Unicode interchange formats, and display formats for character glyphs, then maybe something useful can be produced. Thus using 128-bit binary numbers in a local computer system and using existing Unicode characters for interchange of information between computer systems, converting from the one format to the other depending upon the needs for local processing and for interchange of information. Of particular significance is the concept of encoding individual items each with its own code point. Could this be used to relate glyphs to the Internet of Things? Could things like International Standard Book Numbers be included, with a code point for each book edition? What about individual copies of a rare book? What about museum items? What about paintings and sculptures? Could this tie up with serial numbers used in GS1-128 Barcodes? Please note that the 128 in GS1-128 refers to the 128 characters of ASCII, not to 128-bits. I am wondering whether U+FFF8 plus 32 tag characters could be handled directly by a GSUB glyph substitution within an OpenType font. However, with such a large code space, there would need to be a way to access glyph information over the internet, maybe use of a one-glyph web font for each glyph would be possible in some way. William Overington Monday 2 April 2018
