On Fri, 18 Jan 2002, Kenneth Whistler wrote:
> > The two points below raise the question to me, is popularity/use
> > the criterion or not.
> ^^^
> Presuppositional error. These encoding decisions are not made on the
> basis of a single, axiomatic criterion.
Well, I was merely responding TO the contention that because it
is not popular, we cannot accept it. I did not believe it was the
actual criterion, or that there was only one. But your elaboration
on the criteria, charter, and background have been most enjoyable.
James Kass wrote:
>Has there been any consideration of practical alternatives, such as
>selecting a lookalike or similar character from the plethora of those
>already encoded and promoting its use to represent the "newpi"
>character?
My own proposal was a pictogram: A circle with a radius to "3 o'clock",
i.e. from 0 to 1 in the complex number plane. Pacman with mouth closed.
Does that already exist in Unicode? :-) My dad's version is a lot more
palatable for most people.
For any of you interested in the evolution of mathematical symbols,
I highly recommend A History of Mathematical Notations, by Florian
Cajori, 1929, both volumes recently reprinted as one Dover paperback.
http://store.doverpublications.com/by-subject-mathematics.html
and Kenneth Whistler wrote:
>Ooh, throwing red meat to the lions!
>When speaking of status quo ante, it is important to keep in mind the
>perspective you have on the matter.
>The status quo for most Unicode developers was the existence of a large,
>and proliferating collection of overlapping, incomplete, and only
>partially interoperable character encodings (numbering in the multiple
>hundreds) that made internationalization engineering a mess and which
>resulted in countless opportunities for data corruption when attempting
>to operate in a global information context. Furthermore, many useful
>characters, including some national scripts and many minority and
>historic scripts, were completely unrepresentable in any significant
>character encoding standard, and required local hacks based on fonts,
>typically non-communicable in email, on the web, or in common document
>formats.
and
> Popularity, per se, is generally not a good criterion, though it
> depends in part on the nature of the constituency. Certainly,
> for example, the Klingon script had a certain passion and popularity
> among its supporters, but it failed of other criteria for being
> suitable for encoding. But "popularity" among the voting members
> of the UTC and the active voting members of WG2 is absolutely
> vital.
>
> The existence of well-documented proposals, and the presence of
> advocates -- especially advocates who have clout (earned or unearned) --
> in the relevant standards committees is also a factor. And just
> plain horsetrading during resolution of national body ballot comments
> during ISO voting is also a factor. Lots of things that probably
> shouldn't be characters got to be encoded as characters that way.
>
> The mission of Unicode is to provide an enumerated set of characters
> sufficient to represent the vast majority of what is (or was) in
> regular use in writing systems and character-like symbol systems
> of the world, so that IT systems can be used to process, store and
> render them.
>
> If and when the copyleft symbol and/or \newpi rise far enough above
> the noise level to demonstrate validity for encoding on one (or
> better, many) of the kinds of criteria listed above, then the
> UTC is likely to quickly encode it/them as characters.
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