Re: Proposal to add standardized variation sequences for chess notation

From: Philippe Verdy <verdy_p_at_wanadoo.fr>
Date: Sat, 8 Apr 2017 14:01:32 +0200

2017-04-08 13:10 GMT+02:00 Michael Everson <everson_at_evertype.com>:

> On 8 Apr 2017, at 02:02, Asmus Freytag <asmusf_at_ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>
> >> This isn’t about game play.
> >
> > Why rule this out? Once you have a plain text solution, you'll enable
> any plain text platform.
> >
> > Seems almost churlish to want to limit what you can do...in what would
> be after the fact.
>
> Developers can already use the encoded chess characters in game apps if
> they want.
>
> If we have a set of standardized variation sequences for chess notation,
> then if game developers want to use them, who is to complain? But that is
> not the point of this proposal, which is to enable people working with
> chess notation to be able to use the UCS (which they aren’t doing). An app
> interface has not the same plain-text requirement that people working with
> chess data do.
>
> (They ARE using fonts, which shows they want to do this in text. They are
> NOT using UCS characters, and they do NOT have a coherent model amongst any
> of their hacks.)
>

May be they use fonts, but is OpenType the best tool for applications to
create indexed collections of glyphs? SVG fonts are much easier to develop
and change as they want. And SVG glyphs are easier to integrate in derived
documents. For implementing a simple game, they don't need large
collections. They can more easily integrate photographic features, or 3D
features. OpenType implementations suffer from a huge resistance for newer
features many features don't work if at the same time the Opentype renderer
is not updated on the supporting platform (OS or web browser)

OK there are some new SVG features as well, but they are much more tested
than those in OpenType and much better documented, and don't suffer from
various propritary extensions (such as font hinting which is definitely not
"Open" and extremely poorly documented with many internal tricks made to
restrict their use on specific OSes, plus stupid limitations/bugs in the
way they were encoded, with no vision at all for their evolution or
interaction with other features)...
Received on Sat Apr 08 2017 - 07:02:32 CDT

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