- From: Asmus Freytag <asmusf@ix.netcom.com>
- Date: Sat, 25 Jan 2014 09:39:56 -0800
- To: John Cowan <cowan@mercury.ccil.org>, Simon Sapin <simon.sapin@exyr.org>
- CC: Andrew Cunningham <acunningham@slv.vic.gov.au>, Anne van Kesteren <annevk@annevk.nl>, Richard Ishida <ishida@w3.org>, "Phillips, Addison" <addison@lab126.com>, www International <www-international@w3.org>, www-style list <www-style@w3.org>, "Tab Atkins Jr." <jackalmage@gmail.com>, Zack Weinberg <zackw@panix.com>
On 1/25/2014 8:16 AM, John Cowan wrote: >> As to languages that are not in Unicode yet, the fix is to add them >> >to Unicode. > As you know, that takes several years and the cooperation of many, many > people, and has to compete for attention with numerous other proposals. Because if 'rush' it, you are likely to make mistakes, and therefore the process deliberately encourages a measured pace. Add to that, the fact that most remaining additions are for languages for which there rarely is a settled implementation and for which the background information needed for creating a correct encoding model is usually not widely accessible. But the process continues. > There is also the constant concern that the commercial enterprises > that have supported Unicode so far will decide that it is "commercially > complete", and that there is no longer any need to support new characters > for the benefit of Fourth World people who live in the back of beyond > and don't have a bean to contribute to the global economy. This has two aspects, funding for the Unicode Consortium, and support of Unicode extension in mainstream fonts and implementations. Both should be taken seriously, both are amenable to solutions, but they are a bit out of scope for this discussion. The take-away for now is that locking a spec into "unicode-only" mode definitely locks out certain ermergent user communities - at least temporarily. The corollary is that de-facto there is such a thing as "modern legacy", however much one would like to live without. A./
Received on Saturday, 25 January 2014 17:40:41 UTC