Michael writes:
> Ar 06:57 -0700 1999-10-01, scríobh John Hudson:
>>At the risk of inciting another interminable thread on the politics of
>>Unicode, may I ask someone to explain _briefly_ why Ogham and Runic have
>>been encoded in the BMP instead of Plane 1?
>
> Technical reasons: They were small, they were simple, they have a high
> internet presence (much higher than many other scripts) due to enthusiastic
> role-playing-gamers and neo-pagans (a market), and they were ready before
> Plane 1 was even a project.
>
Remember, John, that until the Deseret Alphabet was proposed for encoding in
1997 (somewhat later than Ogham and Runic), nobody was willing to have their
characters encoded off the BMP. The main reason for bringing up the Deseret
Alphabet for encoding at that time was that it was a legitimate writing
system and candidate for encoding, but no national body had a vested
emotional interest in it -- nobody would object to its being off the BMP.
Shavian, Etruscan, and Gothic were brought up at about the same time for the
same reasons, although Shavian seems not to have moved on to the WG2
approval stage. With the deadlock broken, we're starting to see vendors
like Microsoft and Apple provide support for surrogates and more useful
things are being put up off the BMP.
=====
John H. Jenkins
jenkins@apple.com
tseng@blueneptune.com
http://www.blueneptune.com/~tseng
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