From: Asmus Freytag (asmusf@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Wed Mar 02 2005 - 12:04:42 CST
To cut a long discussion to its essence:
At 09:08 AM 3/2/2005, UList@dfa-mail.com wrote:
>11. *Therefore*, some kind of "custom language tag" system is a
>*requirement*, for Unicode to function as it is claimed it is *intended*
>to function.
Fraktur is a variant of Latin (sharing many aspects of what you discussed
in your points 1-10, which I will not repeat here), but it is not accessed
via a language tag, but via font shift.
Therefore, your requirement is generalized to
"Having some kind of system to capture a generalized stylistic variation
within a script as defined by Unicode, would make it easier."
No-one would disagree with that. Note that such a system does not need to
reside on the encoding level, i.e. does not need to involve any feature of
the Unicode Standard, and probably shouldn't.
It would be ideal, if HTML or CSS had a more flexible, yet portable, method
to capture such differences in character shapes in an interchangeable way.
That would make your job easier. As it is, you can create and encode the
texts, but users that don't have the same fonts as you do, will see generic
shapes, not the specific ones.
The same goes for any attempt to use HTML to create a facsimile of a
Fraktur edition of, say, Goethe's works.
As Peter pointed out, if such an extension was generically useful for a
larger audience, it could gain acceptance. If not, it very likely will not
be considered.
In terms of your own project, you might consider the timeline. Getting any
change into a standard, whether Unicode or CSS, takes years. And the more
substantive the proposed change is, the longer it takes and the smaller the
chances are that it will be adopted.
A./
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