From: Richard Wordingham (richard.wordingham@ntlworld.com)
Date: Wed Apr 05 2006 - 00:35:09 CST
Doug Ewell wrote:
> Michael, having written hundreds of such documents, is probably a lot more
> confident than I would be about whether people take him seriously.
What happened to the proposal for heart-shaped dots? I'm sure they would
find a lot more application than Phaistos disk characters! (Admittedly,
most renderers do a poor job of producing multi-coloured glyphs.) I also
recall someone somewhere citing the Phaistos disk characters as an example
of what would *not* be encoded.
The fact is that some people did think (or hope?) he was joking when he
resurrected the Phaistos disk character proposal.
The Phaistos disk characters run up against one major objection from TUS 4.0
Section 1.1 (Coverage) Paragraph 3: 'Note, however, that the Unicode
Standard does not encode idiosyncratic, personal, novel, or private-use
characters, nor does it encode logos or graphics.' The Phaistos disk
characters are not being encoded to enable meaning to be encoded - they are
proposed as a handy way to call up certain graphics, namely the pictures of
certain characters.
The heart-shaped dots run up against another issue - sometimes the meaning
of text lies in its typeface! It can be done more crudely, e.g. the choice
of Roman numerals v. Arabic numerals (Christian, not godless), or a choice
of Thai digits over European digits to assert Thainess or possibly other
conservative values.
Richard.
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