From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Thu Oct 16 2003 - 15:40:59 CST
At 23:29 +0200 2003-10-16, Philippe Verdy wrote:
>I would definitely prefer to have a system in which any leakage of private
>uses could be controled under a well-known policy requiring a reservation
>in a publicly accessible registry, like domain names.
Well, you can't. Private Use is Private Use. You cannot restrict it.
You cannot control it. You can, as a private person, guide it, as
John and I do for some scripts in the CSUR. But that isn't standard,
and it isn't going to be. Ever. Guaranteed.
>If one designs an open reservation system in a global registry
Like the CSUR? No, that's closed, because John and I decide what we
let in and what we don't.
>(possibly with small annual fees to maintain this registration in a
>global registry),
Which no one would ever pay.....
>the reservation could be made much more safe.
Not at all.
>In addition, this would not prohibit rapid innovation or usage of
>new characters, and further standardization if needed in the
>Unicode/ISO10646 space, where these characters, now of public
>interest, could be assigned more permanently and without renewal=
>fees, provided that their usage is clearly documented by its author
>and interested groups of users...
Even *I* (who encourage all of you to contribute generously to the
Script Encoding Initiative, which actually *does* manage to get
characters encoded) would not dream of trying to charge money in such
a loony scheme.
>The main reason why those semi-private characters could be standardized
>later is for conservation of documents which could then be transcoded to
>the now safe Unicode/ISO10646 space.
There is no such thing as a semi-private character. There are
standardized characters (which have particular meanings), and there
are private use characters (which are guaranteed to have no meanings
at all).
-- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
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