From: William_J_G Overington (wjgo_10009@btinternet.com)
Date: Fri Jan 28 2011 - 01:50:14 CST
On Thursday 27 January 2011, Neil Harris <neil@tonal.clara.co.uk> wrote:
> Compared to other proposals, systems such as William's have two major added complications:
>
> 1) wanting every possible reasonable utterance to have its own character, which certainly doesn't, if only because the number of possible combinations for even simple sentences vastly outstrips the number of available codepoints by many orders of magnitude.
My idea does not seek to do that. I am suggesting that there be a finite number of localizable sentences. It could be hundreds, maybe thousands eventually. I am thinking that Unicode could encode a few to start in plane 7 in Unicode 7.0 so as to get started and then more could be added gradually with each update to Unicode as people discover particular needs.
Also, the idea is not about "combinations for even simple sentences", it is about one codepoint for each whole sentence encoded. The sentences would be chosen so that there would be no grammatical carry forward from one sentence to another.
So that claimed complication does not exist in what I am suggesting here.
> 2) desiring them to be encoded before actual usage, rather than the other way around
Well, that is a complication.
Yet I feel that it is the way to get the system implemented successfully. The alternative, of using first a Private Use Area encoding and it becoming widely successful before encoding into regular Unicode has many problems. I feel that if some localizable sentences are encoded into regular Unicode then they are non-proprietary and so everyone and every company can make use of them on an even basis as part of modern information technology.
> the combination of which seems to me to offer an insuperable obstacle to meeting the current rules, or indeed any other foreseeable practically implementable rules that conserve the Unicode code point space for the future.
Well, what I am suggesting might not meet the current rules. However, the committees could, if they wish, encode some localizable sentences in plane 7 if they so choose. Certainly, that might well need consideration of whether anyone would be adversely affected by such an action. Yet perhaps the encoding in plane 7, rather than mixed in with other encodings in some other plane, might be adequate ringfencing of the localizable sentence characters. Also, each localizable sentence character would have a graphic symbol for basic display if automated localization facilities were either not available, or not chosen by user choice, at a particular display on a computer screen or mobile telephone or portable pad.
> Even if they end up falling at the first hurdle when submitted, being invited to generate a proposal, and thus needing to take a long hard look at the details of how these systems might be implemented, will hopefully concentrate the minds of the proposers of this sort of scheme. I rather look forward to reading William's proposal, if and when he presents one.
I have been researching this idea for some time. I have come to the conclusion that trying to produce the whole thing on my own in the Private Use Area, then to persuade people and companies to use my system in the Private Use Area in the hope that one day the standardization committees might encode the sentences into regular Unicode is unrealistic. Yet if the system is constructed piece by piece in regular Unicode then it is regular Unicode to start and progress can proceed.
William Overington
28 January 2011
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