From: William_J_G Overington (wjgo_10009@btinternet.com)
Date: Fri Mar 04 2011 - 04:26:21 CST
On Thursday 3 March 2011, Asmus Freytag <asmusf@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> Common to these proposals is that they are not plain characters, but rather have elements of control or layout function and that they are not (arguably) about representing a *symbol* used in writing *text* (to paraphrase Ken's excellent recent contribution). In these cases, and similar examples, it's much harder to conceive of a way that they could be made to fit the scope of Unicode, and I've not been hesitant to express that view. :)
I suggest that a way could be found to make proposals for localizable phrases and pixel instructions fit the scope of Unicode if either of the following circumstances were to occur.
1. Private Use Area representations being used widely, either in hardware such as mobile telephones or in software apps on mobile telephones; and those messages becoming stored in Google's databases and causing confusion with other uses of Private Use Area characters.
2. A general consensus emerging that it would be for the benefit of people if such items were to become encoded proactively into regular Unicode.
There may be other circumstances.
Protective measures could be used: for example, putting all of the localizable phrases in plane 7 and having a default printable glyph for each so that if a codepoint were not localized as text (due to either user choice or the absence of a database of localized text in a language that the user selects) then a symbol could be displayed.
In relation to the pixel instructions, I produced the encoding as an item of art, in response to a statement made in a post in this thread. If the encoding gets used, then fine. However, I am not actively promoting it. However, if anyone wants to develop it then that is alright.
Since posting the encoding yesterday, I have thought that a situation might arise where the message needed to define an image is longer than the message that can be sent and thus more than one message would need to be sent to define the image. For example, if an image were to be defined using two or more twitter-length messages.
So I have added the following codes.
U+E9F1 PIXEL LAYOUT PAUSE
U+E9F2 PIXEL LAYOUT RESTART
Simply use U+E9F1 near the end of one message and U+E9F2 near the start of the next message and the image could be built up using as many messages as necessary.
I have also been thinking about adding some user-definable colours.
William Overington
4 March 2011
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