Re: Universal Metacharacters

Avoid@gmail wrote:
> Just how much would it cost to define a dozen of new, arbitrary characters,
> reserved for this sole use, under the control of some authority (say the
> TAG)?

To define them, not much. Your main issue would be convincing the 
Unicode people that:

a. U+001B was a good idea after all, not a dinosaur that existed to deal 
with technological issues that no longer apply.

b. Yet more special characters are needed, and they'll actually be used 
this time, and actually be a success, and aren't at all like tag 
characters in the U+E0000 to U+E007F range.

c. There is some sort of failing in the current system.

d. Your system would work better.

e. To change the current policy on what should be handled by Unicode and 
what should be handled by markup - at least in so far as creating 
special characters whose use is then handed over to markup.

To update languages, editors (and you'd *have* to update editors to deal 
with these new special characters) and running code (especially fun when 
layers with very different escape mechanisms - say Javascript, (X)(HT)ML 
and URIs - start using the same new escape character, requiring 
complicated rejiggery), probably billions.

Received on Tuesday, 22 August 2006 09:37:28 UTC