Re: Why 17 planes?

From: Doug Ewell <doug_at_ewellic.org>
Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2012 09:22:15 -0700

William_J_G Overington <wjgo underscore 10009 at btinternet dot com>
wrote:

>> It is perhaps a tribute of some sort to the elegance of Unicode/10646
>> that people seem to want to use it to encode things that are so
>> desperately far out of its scope.
>
> That is, if I may say so, an excellent way of putting it.

But it's like saying "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery"; it
doesn't imply the imitation is a good thing.

> For example, there is my research on communication through the
> language barrier...

No, stop right there. This is an excellent example of something that is
NOT characters, and has NO place in a character encoding standard.

As I wrote in my other post: Define a new standard for the elements of
your system, and define the rules by which elements are encoded (or
not). Do NOT try to make this system conceptually part of Unicode. Do
NOT imagine that encoding these non-character elements in the PUA makes
them characters. Do NOT imagine that creating a font with glyphs for
these elements makes them characters. Do NOT try to redefine the term
"character" to make these elements fit within your new definition.

There are plenty of great standards out there for encoding things that
are NOT characters. Please feel free to add to THAT idea space.

--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA
http://www.ewellic.org | @DougEwell ­
Received on Wed Nov 28 2012 - 10:24:20 CST

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