Re: Three modest proposals

From: Julian Bradfield (jcb+unicode@inf.ed.ac.uk)
Date: Mon Apr 04 2011 - 03:03:08 CDT

  • Next message: Michael Everson: "Re: Three modest proposals"

    On 2011-04-03, James Allan <jallanite@rogers.com> wrote:
    > I have forgotten now where I first seen these hatchings, but they are,
    > or at least were, in common use.

    In the contexts I described, such as books where colour is too
    expensive.

    > indicate furs on page 87. Admittedly special characters are not used,

    Precisely the point. They never have been.

    > See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatching_system for a discussion
    > of various hatching systems used in heraldry of which the Petra Sancta
    > system advocated by Everson is the most commonly used.

    I don't understand your point. Anybody who (a) knows anything about
    heraldry, OR (b) has read Michael's proposal, knows this. The
    existence of hatching systems is not in dispute.

    > I realize that you are talking about not having seen characters showing
    > the hatchings to be used in legends rather than not seeing the hatchings
    > themselves, but that ought to have been made more clear.

    It was clear if you had followed the discussion, or even from the
    entirety of the post from which you extracted a paragraph.

    > never been used, then Everson’s proposal is just another one for
    > characters that might be useful. It has been stated again and again that
    > characters will not be encoded by Unicode merely because they “might” be
    > useful.

    Indeed. Whether practice has followed the statement is another
    question.

    It might have been better if Unicode had allocated a "Supplementary
    Symbolic Plane" specifically for the purpose of non-character
    graphics; then at least font designers and text processors could
    simply ignore that entire plane, and then the multilingual planes
    could have held to a strict policy. Unfortunately that's not where we
    are.

    -- 
    The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
    Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
    


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