Re: A Potentially Useful Property - Last Informative Proposal

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Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA
http://www.ewellic.org | @DougEwell
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-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Wordingham <richard.wordingham_at_ntlworld.com>
Sender: unicode-bounce_at_unicode.org
Date: Sat, 28 Jul 2012 03:15:18 
To: <unicode_at_unicode.org>
Subject: A Potentially Useful Property - Last Informative Proposal
As writing systems can be quite complex, there is often useful
information about a character that cannot be found in the Unicode
Character Database or the Unicode Standard, but is present in one of
the proposals leading up to its inclusion.
To this end I have half-jokingly suggested that it would be useful to
have an informative numeric property 'last informative proposal'.  A
non-missing value xxxx would indicate that the last proposal to contain
useful information about it would be held as
http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/nxxxx.pdf .
Now, there can be problems with establishing the value - it may be
require a judgement call as to when revised proposals started to
provide less useful information.  There are also subtle variations in
the URI.  Now, I don't seriously expect the Unicode Consortium to take
on the task of setting up such a database, but are there any publicly
available databases with such information or a reasonable
approximation?  A poor approximation - but a lot better than nothing -
is the derived age property which records when a character entered
Unicode.  One problem with using a search engine is that the name and
code point proposed for a character can change during the encoding
process.
Richard.