On 3/4/2016 8:51 AM, Doug Ewell wrote:
Pierpaolo Bernardi wrote:
And the NamesList.txt of Unicode Character Database gives the
description: Japanese Hinamatsuri or girls' doll festival. Aren't
they the authorities to let the emoji look like hina-matsuri?
OK. Then you are right in your complaint!
FWIW, I agree that annotations in NamesList.txt are a better
justification for prescribing the glyph design of a Unicode character,
even an emoji, than tribal knowledge about the history or origin of the
character.
Hmm, I had thought the vast majority of characters in Unicode have
shapes (or ranges of shapes) that are defined simply by shared
experience of the respective user community - with the exemplar in
the code charts serving merely as a sort of "reminder". That seems
true for most letters.
We don't usually take notice of that, because the implementers
either already share the expectations of the user community or are
able to find out what they are. And there's settled typographical
convention. In this case, we have something that's relatively new
territory and we see some implementers not matching the expectations
of the user community and being faced with bug reports.
I agree that nameslist annotations can be useful to nail down the
intended identity of the character being encoded, and that can help
fix the expected range of shapes. But ultimately, if the users don't
agree that a particular character code can have a 'generic'
identity, but strongly expect to see a 'specific' identity then
implementers will eventually follow. Unicode, being normally
descriptive, rather than prescriptive, will generally stay out of
their way (and if a generic identity should be needed for some other
purpose it may get encoded separately).
At least that's how I always thought this worked. (Leaving aside for
now the small set of symbols encoded for their precise shape).
A./
Received on Fri Mar 04 2016 - 11:20:28 CST