Re: Hexadecimal characters.

From: Peter_Constable@sil.org
Date: Fri Jun 21 2002 - 10:06:55 EDT


On 06/21/2002 05:07:53 AM "William Overington" wrote:

>In the light of a few interested people trying out Mr Finch's ideas, then
>either a proposal for regular Unicode could be made

Not worth the effort since it has already been rejected.

or I could make a
>permanent assignment to the U+E6.. block in my collection of code points
if
>that would be regarded as serving a useful purpose.

Understand that that would be nothing more than an agreement between you
and Mr. Finch (assuming he'd agree with you), and perhaps a few other
eccentric individuals. (Yes, encoding separate hex digits is eccentric.)

>I do feel though that Mr Finch should be helped to try out his idea so
that
>whether it is an idea worth pursuing may be established by scientific
>enquiry.

First, Mr. Finch doesn't need you to reserve PUA codepoints in order for
him to do some scientific inquiry. He can just write whatever code he wants
that implements whatever PUA codepoints he wants to choose. Secondly, this
is not a matter of pure scientific enquiry. It has to do with practical
realities, and there have already been enough sound arguments made to show
that the proposal is a non-starter. In purely theoretical terms, would an
implemntation be possible? Yes. I don't think it takes much of a scientific
research endeavour to realise that. But the point is that the proposal in
neither practical nor necessary. (And your example of a potential need was
totally unconvincing -- if someone is dragging their mouse across a
graphic, they won't be able to tell whether strings that are not visible
simultaneously or vertically aligned use monospaced glyphs, nor are they
likely to care.)

- Peter

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Constable

Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International
7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA
Tel: +1 972 708 7485
E-mail: <peter_constable@sil.org>



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