At 11:36 AM 1/18/02 -0800, Rick McGowan wrote:
>It is our job as a standarizing organization to standardize what is IN USE
>so that (as a goal) people can standard-ly communicate those symbols
>internationally without ambiguity. It is _NOT_ our job, and never will be
>our job, to invent new symbols or rally around new symbols that we think
>are cool or useful in any particular branch of study and then promote their
>use.
In fact:
The only time where we have added a recently invented symbol that we knew
*not* yet to be in any actual use, was the euro symbol. This was not a
revolutionary act ;-) on our part, but reflected the creditable
representation by the European Commission that its use would be required in
the very near future.
If the American Mathematical Society (arguably the currently most
influential publisher of mathematical papers world wide) were to institute
a policy that from a given date, all manuscripts were required to use the
symbol for 2 pi, instead of 2*pi -- in that hypothetical case, such a
symbol could potentially be encoded before it's in actual use, especially
if that move had resonated well in the math community and other publisher
were likely to follow it.
What distinguishes the real and hypothetical case set forth here, from the
proposal at hand is a creditable commitment on part of a large and
identifiable user community to begin use of a symbol, as soon as it is
available. Even so, the situation would feel to the character encoding
community as a very exceptional situation, fraught with residual risk of
early obsolescence of the character.
Why don't we postpone the rest of this discussion until the day it comes
back with the kind of endorsements suggested in the case studies.
A./
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Jan 18 2002 - 17:33:24 EST