From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Sat Apr 22 2006 - 03:41:04 CST
From: "Richard Wordingham" <richard.wordingham@ntlworld.com>
> Kenneth Whistler wrote on Saturday, April 22, 2006 at 12:50 AM
>> 875,441 available code points / 1500 characters encoded per year
>> = 583 years
>> And that is assuming that the committees will continue to encode
>> 1500 characters per year indefinitely, which they won't.
>> And that is assuming that Unicode itself will last for more than
>> 500 years, which it won't.
And that's exactly the situation when the existing codepoint space will start being taken for other uses than just character encoding. There will effectively be lots of concurrent standard competing for this space for other uses, simply because the protocols that use Unicode will be legions, with complex cases to handle their interoperability. I'm quite sure that a time willcome where more info willneed to be inserted in the same stream, and given that Unicode/ISO/CEI 10646 will have left a very large unused space, it will be very attractive for those competing standards to request their own allocations.
In that event, the unified repertoire will remain, but the free space will be used in variousregistries, and if we want to avoid collisions, eachstandard willbe given its own encoding space for their own purpose and semantics. Ofcourse for ISO/CEI 10646 and unicode it will just look as blind data with no character semantic (but the semantics will be found in other registries).
I think this will happen long before the expected 500 years, possibly even before the next century, when Unicode and ISO/CEI 10646 will have no more things to standardize according to the existing encoding policies: Money and research will be moved to other protocols or standards with new policies (even even, possibly a recreation of the text encoding standard, "ISO xxx646?", to allow simpler and more efficient algorithms with more capabilities, and with a complex mapping of the new standard to legacy Unicode/ISO/CEI 10646).
It is thissort of mapping that will possibly require such large encoding space to preserve interoperability with systems using the newer standard and legacy applications using the legacy standard.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Apr 22 2006 - 03:43:14 CST