Re: Possibilities of future expansion (from Perception etc thread and fictional etc thread)

From: Peter_Constable@sil.org
Date: Mon Feb 26 2001 - 09:19:09 EST


On 02/25/2001 05:16:15 AM "William Overington" wrote:

[snip]

>Yet suppose that some organization were to have "Encode Your Character
Here
>For Free" with light moderation only and openly stated that the way that
the
>organization planned to make a profit were to encode all of the characters
>suggested to it by visitors to its website into the hexadecimal range
200000
>to 2FFFFF...

>Well, if it caught on, is it possible that some manufacturers of unicode
>compatible word processors might build in a facility...

This sounds like something that's not very likely to catch on (and not
likely to be profitable), especially with any major software manufacturer.
Suppose I populate said Hypercode with a "character", ISOMORPHIC
BOWL-OF-WRATH SPANNER WITH JEWS HARP ACCOMPANIMENT. The user community
interested in this thing will quite possibly amount to one - me (and even I
don't know what it's supposed to be! If it's lucky, it might develop a cult
following - probably short-lived - of a few hundred out of a global
population of 6G.) Name one software developer who would want to support
such a character?

Your idea can only make sense if the codespace is populated with things
that have widespread usefulness, but a process of "encode your character
here for free" will decidedly not achieve that. It will contain a *huge*
lot of things like IBOWSWJHA. The only way it can end up with something at
all useful, like a comprehensive and well thought out set of control codes
for supplementing music notation characters in order to come up with a good
implementation for textual encoding of complete music scores, is if it goes
through some committee process with lots of review. That kind of process
exists today in forums like UTC and W3G.

- Peter

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Constable

Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International
7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA
Tel: +1 972 708 7485
E-mail: <peter_constable@sil.org>



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