From: James Kass (thunder-bird@earthlink.net)
Date: Fri Jan 02 2009 - 18:42:51 CST
Peter Constable replied,
> > As we've discussed here previously, the telephone companies
> > have apparently already resolved *their* interoperability
> > issues by mapping from their own user defined mutually
> > incompatible Shift-JIS encodings into Unicode's PUA consistently.
>
> There's an oxymoronic problem here that isn't sustainable in
> the long run: public interchange using private-use encodings.
> Either public interchange is not assumed to be possible, or
> the private-use area is no longer really private. If public
> interchange *is* happening in text protocols, then the
> de facto reality is that there are (abstract) characters*
> involved that are potential candidates for encoding in
> the Universal Character Set.
Private Use Area just means user-defined area. There's nothing
secret or damaging about user-defined characters, whether
they be suitable potential candidates for standard plain-text,
or whether they are destined to remain banished in the
phantom zone for all eternity. There will always be people
wishing or needing to exchange user-defined material, and
there's nothing wrong with that. They are using the PUA
correctly.
Search engine companies who feel compelled to index such
user-defined runs of text or symbols are perfectly free
to do so.
What does a search engine do when it runs into a Tamil
web page encoded using non-standard PUA conventions,
such as TUNE?
www.tunerfc.tn.nic.in/TUNE-an_introduction.pdf
-------------
Leo Broukhis responded to Peter Constable's paragraph quoted above,
> Would it be possible to solve this problem by designating a set of
> "telecom compatibility characters"
> without going into the details of their semantics in the canonical
> character names,
> so that each TELECOM COMPATIBILITY CHARACTER NNN
> will be standardized as "NNN" drawn in a distinctive way, but in
> practice a multitude of "fantasy" fonts
Or, how about "CONTROL PICTURE FOR EMOJI NNN"?
--------------
Peter Constable wrote,
> These are getting interchanged publicly between
> different vendors products. That's not private use.
Semantics. There is no point to user defined characters if
they can't be exchanged. There is even at least one well-known
PUA registry.
> > How does allowing these things in now preclude other ICT industry
> > sectors from making their own icon sets and exchanging them via
> > plain-text protocols as private use characters?
>
> Obviously, encoding these would not be done as a
> tactic to keep others from doing likewise.
Quite so. Refusing to encode these would be the best
tactic to keep others from using the PUA to "promote"
their thingies into regular Unicode.
> > ... Machiavellian theories ...
>
> Still very far fetched.
If we accept the premise that the committee is really an organism
feeding on itself, we might consider that any imputed problems
associated with committees would tend to be self-correcting.
Which takes us from Machiavelli to Malthus, more or less.
Best regards,
James Kass
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