[OT] UTF-81920 was RE: Unicode forms for internal storage - BOCU-1 speed

From: Jon Hanna (jon@hackcraft.net)
Date: Fri Jan 23 2004 - 07:07:42 EST

  • Next message: Philippe Verdy: "Re: [OT] UTF-81920 was RE: Unicode forms for internal storage - BOCU-1 speed"

    Quoting Marco Cimarosti <marco.cimarosti@essetre.it>:

    > Jon Hanna wrote:
    > > I refuse to rename my UTF-81920!
    >
    > Doug, Shlomi, there's a new one out there!
    >
    > Jon, would you mind describing it?

    There are two different UTF-81920s (the resultant ambiguity is very much in the
    spirit of UTF-81920).

    The first is not only not a proper UTF, but it is not Unicode at all; rather
    it's science fiction.
    The expected lifetime of Unicode was mentioned a while back which set me
    thinking about what could go beyond Unicode and why. Hypothesising a massive
    increase in computing power, bandwidth and other technological limitations I
    imagined an expert system that could read a piece of text much as an expert in
    linguistics, typography, calligraphy and disciplines related to the text might.
    Two such systems would not communicate with each other only in terms of
    characters, but also in terms of descriptions of characters and so "c with a
    downwards-pointing triangle found in some Chumash text, possibly a fancified
    hacek, possibly something else" (from a recent post to this list) could be
    "encoded" so to speak. Since a detail description of a character, especially
    one that could not be reliably compared with a known character, could
    potentially be quite large I picked the figure of 10KB out of the air and hence
    UTF-81920!

    The second idea is a possibly practical one inspired by the above flight of
    fancy - of a Wiki or similar of information about the various characters
    encoded in Unicode, or proposed characters, or even a note on why the reserve
    code points U+2072 and U+2073 aren't superscript 2 and superscript 3, encoding
    histories and so on. I wouldn't be able to contribute to such a project (and
    most of those who would are very busy), but I'd certainly enjoy flicking
    through it if it existed.

    -- 
    Jon Hanna
    <http://www.hackcraft.net/>
    *Thought provoking quote goes here*
    


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