William Overington wrote:
> I have updated my suggestion. Here is the latest version for discussion.
...
> Specific protocols to use with such tagging can be devised.
...
> The suggestion is open for discussion and I hope to gain fairly widespread
> agreement within the unicode user community.
And there have been a couple of no-doubt frustrating responses already.
I would like to uplevel briefly here and suggest why the people
on this list are not engaging in the details of Mr. Overington's
proposals so much as questioning the need for such a protocol,
arguing the premises, talking about the role of metadata, and so
on.
The Unicode discussion list is focussed first-and-foremost on the
Unicode Standard itself. The discussants here often discuss additional
characters or scripts to be added to the standard, particular
implementation issues for some character or script, the details
of algorithms needed for implementing the Unicode Standard, and
then love to go OT to discuss interesting issues relating to
languages, scripts, etymologies and such.
One thing the Unicode discussion list doesn't do is develop
protocols. That is the kind of work that instead often takes place
on temporary Working Group discussion lists in the IETF.
While Mr. Overington's initial proposals were couched in terms
of character encoding, it soon became clear to the list and to
him that we weren't talking about standardizing any characters,
but instead a proposal for particular private uses of PUA
characters -- something the UTC and WG2 cannot and will not
endorse, precisely because they *are* private use characters.
And as has become clear in Mr. Overington's latest statement of
what he is proposing, this is really a proposal for a protocol:
a specification of a method for communicating particular interpretations
of rationally segmented portions of the PUA.
As such, this (unicode@unicode.org) is probably the wrong forum
to be trying to discuss, modify, and gain working consensus on
such a protocol proposal. It just isn't that kind of forum.
unicode@unicode.org doesn't "work on" specific documents as a group,
with the aim of publishing them as standard protocols for general
usage. There is no program of work and no moderator whose job
it is to attempt to solicit and capture consensus and move a
document towards final form.
The mechanism that is more appropriate to that would be to
take the proposal, rework it as an Internet Draft,
solicit commentary on that document, and then try to develop
consensus *within the IETF* to progress such a document to
a standard protocol.
Of course in such a forum any proposal like this would also
face questions regarding justification and alternatives. And
those might be equally frustrating there.
But anyone who comes to the unicode@unicode.org list looking
to actually develop and establish a standard protocol involving
Unicode is looking in the wrong place.
--Ken
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Jul 06 2001 - 00:17:16 EDT