From: Peter Constable (petercon@microsoft.com)
Date: Wed Mar 11 2009 - 09:21:17 CST
From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org] On Behalf Of Michael Everson
> For pity's sake, Peter, could you not manage an analogy that actually
> fits?
>
> Saying that RABBIT and RAT and DOG are symbols which **can be
> legitimately used** to represent Rabbit and Rat and Dog in Chinese
> astrology is IN NO WAY similar to redefining the character properties
> of an Arabic letter.
Those characters certainly can be used for that or other purposes. But the user must recognize that implementations will be influenced by prior use in Japanese telecoms than possible future uses as astrology signs or whatever else. That's the analogy.
> I would imagine that they would be "handled" by the software in being
> transmitted from one place to another as symbols with symbol
> properties.
Transmission is not particularly an issue.
> I would imagine that the phone companies would use fonts
> appropriate to their audience. And I would imagine that font vendors,
> large and small, will supply glyphs as they see fit.
Fonts, perhaps; or something else entirely.
It's anybody's prerogative to display characters in whatever way they choose so long as the original semantic is maintained. In the case of most characters, a font is almost always used. In the case of these characters, the original semantic is defined by a context (JPN telecoms) that suggest that, in a large proportion of uses, something other than fonts will be used. As is true for many other characters in the UCS, these characters will always bear the influence of their history. That's Ken's point, and I echo it. They are emoji, not arbitrary symbols free of all context.
Peter
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