From: David Starner (prosfilaes@gmail.com)
Date: Thu Jan 27 2011 - 13:28:08 CST
On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 10:34 AM, Doug Ewell <doug@ewellic.org> wrote:
> That is the right approach to take for writing systems. That is not the
> right approach to take for entities that have nothing to do with writing
> systems.
I don't know that that's true. If a user decides to use the PUA in an
internal system, who are we to object? They implicitly promise it
won't see open use, and we basically promise that simple text
processes won't mangle it. We encode all sort of stuff, like markup
and defining insertable regions (Hello, $TITLE $FIRST $LAST) in plain
text already. If you want to have a set group of inline graphics, you
can do (-:, <img=smile.png>, or insert a PUA character. So a lot of
times we're just talking about how it's encoded in plain text, not if.
There's tradeoffs for the PUA, and it can be hard to use, which is
part of the reason there's so few successful uses of it*, but if they
like those tradeoffs, and understand it as an internal use, I don't
see why we should complain.
* I don't know what can be done about it, especially now, but IPA in
ASCII is still found quite often. If linguists find it easier to use
hacks for stuff in Unicode, I'm not sure why anyone else would find it
easy to use PUA for their special characters.
-- Kie ekzistas vivo, ekzistas espero.
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