From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Mon Jun 23 2003 - 08:54:13 EDT
At 01:07 -0500 2003-06-23, Peter_Constable@sil.org wrote:
>It seems to me the proposal would present a stronger case if samples were
>available that were something *other* than an explanation of the symbol in
>a dictionary, encyclopaedia, or other reference.
Possibly, but there is only so much time in the day, and I certainly
did a better job than Mark Davis did with L2/02-361. >:-(
(UTC, please take this as a formal protest at the action taken to
approve the addition of characters based on a document as flimsy as
that one. Bad UTC. No biscuit!)
>It would be similar to these kinds of samples if I were to create a
>proposal using as a sample the Phonetic Symbol Guide, but that might
>not clearly show if a character was something that was merely
>proposed by someone at one time but never actually used -- in such a
>case, taking a sample from Phonetic Symbol Guide does not really
>demonstrate the need to encode as a character for
>text representation.
I tend to disagree. Symbols have a very different nature than
phonetic characters do. We have *all* seen the atom sign, and I have,
as Liungman points out, seen it on maps, though I don't seem to have
such a map here in the house. Similarly, the fleur-de-lis is a
well-known named symbol which can be used to represent a number of
things.
>Likewise, the sample for (e.g.) the fleur-de-lis doesn't really
>provide a case that this should be a character to facilitate
>representation in text.
Of course these can be considered to be dingbats, as many symbols
are. When I look at the set of dingbats and symbols in the Standard,
I find that there some odd omissions. The gender symbols for instance
that I proposed in N2587, and a set of religious symbols which I'm
preparing in another document. More dictionary symbols like the
SHAMROCK. And so on.
>It wouldn't be hard to provide a comparable descriptive paragraph
>that began with an image of the Stars and Stripes, but I don't think
>we'd want to encode the US flag as a character.
That would be a logo.
>I'm not saying that I oppose the proposed characters; just that samples of
>a different nature would make for a stronger case.
I do the best I can. At the end of the day my document won its case
and the five characters were accepted.
-- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
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