From: William_J_G Overington (wjgo_10009@btinternet.com)
Date: Wed May 19 2010 - 06:44:04 CDT
I have been thinking about the conference since the Call for Participation was first made in this mailing list on Tuesday 27 April 2010.
I cannot travel to the conference, yet I hope to participate if there is a distance event, such as another poetry competition or maybe a festival of emoji art.
On Wednesday 28 April 2010 John H. Jenkins wrote as follows in the thread CJK Ideograph Fragments.
quote
The main problem here is that there is a very strong desire to limit ideograph encoding to attested and documentable forms. Anything which does not exist in actual texts is not likely to be well-regarded. Similarly, the UTC has a strong preference not to encoding anything which isn't in actual use. Proposals to encode characters because they would be useful if encoded even though they aren't actually being used right now are generally looked on with disfavor.
end quote
Now, whilst recognising that I am here expressing a view that starts from Mr Jenkins' statement about CJK Ideograph Fragments and applies it more generally, I wonder if I may, with permission, express the view that that policy seems to me to restrict the possibilities for the development of Unicode.
I look at the situation of the emoji. I wonder what would have happened if a few years ago a mobile telephone manufacturer had approached the Unicode Consortium and asked for over 600 emoji glyphs to be encoded in plane 1. There would have been no documented usage to include in a proposal document, yet the manufacturer would have been able to make a statement that encoding at that stage would allow portability amongst manufacturers and avoid a proliferation of Private Use Area encodings.
I have put forward the idea of encoding a portable interpretable object code into Unicode.
http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2010-m01/0098.html
http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2009-m03/0168.html
There were also other posts in the thread in March 2009.
So, I am in the situation that I feel that it would be a good step forward for Unicode if a portable interpretable object code were encoded into Unicode and a paper presented on this topic at the conference. Yet the culture of Unicode appears to be that unless a big company were to request for a portable interpretable object code to become implemented into regular Unicode and unless that request is made after widespread practical usage of a Private Use Area implementation has occurred, then nothing is going to be done. Yet the paradox is that encoding into regular Unicode would offer standardization and allow competing companies all to use the same underlying non-proprietary encoding and achieve stability yet the route to achieving that stability requires encouraging companies to use proprietary encodings in the Private Use Area, which goes directly against the very stability that encoding into regular Unicode would achieve.
The Call for Participation at http://www.unicodeconference.org/call_for_papers.htm lists many types of submission.
Yet are the encoding policies of the Unicode Consortium acting against the very progress that the conference Call for Participation seeks to encourage?
I know that I have experimented with the design of virtual machines for the encoding of a portable interpretable object code into Unicode, yet I do not purport to be an expert computer system and virtual machine designer. Yet if the encoding of a portable interpretable object code into Unicode were to become a real possibility, with the Unicode Technical Committee opening a Public Review on the topic so that the big companies that use Unicode and have experts on computer system design and virtual machine design on their staff could feel that encoding a portable interpretable object code into Unicode were a very real possibility, then a really good system could be achieved. It need not all be encoded at once. Just as with other sets of characters, some characters could be encoded to start and others added over a period of years as development proceeds.
So, although the submission of an abstract for the conference needs to be made by 26 May, is there time for interested people to put in submissions on encoding a portable interpretable object code into Unicode, directly into Unicode?
William Overington
19 May 2010
On Tuesday 18 May 2010, Rick McGowan <rick@unicode.org> wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> I just wanted to remind people that the Call for
> Participation in IUC 34 is open.
>
> The deadline for submitting abstracts is May 26. Don't
> delay, submit today!
>
> http://www.unicodeconference.org/call_for_papers.htm
>
> I'm looking forward to seeing everyone at the conference in
> October.
>
> Cheers,
> Rick
>
>
>
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