On 07/05/2002 03:00:35 PM Marco Cimarosti wrote:
>David Possin wrote:
>> But, if something it silently ignored, then somebody has discovered
>> something that nobody wants to touch. I have observed this sevaral
>> times now, the latest incident was in the Chromatic Font Research
>> thread, with 2 cases:
>>
>> Aztec glyphs: [...] Silence.
>
>Funny. I interpreted that silence the opposite way: very positively. I
>didn't expect any immediate action, and the absence of denials made me
feel
>the information I passed was not totally pointless.
>
>Anyway, even if the silence actually meant "Who cares?", it doesn't bother
>me, because I think this is NOT an issue for Unicode...
I think Marco has got this right. Let's suppose Aztec writing gets
deciphered and there are cases of the same shape with different colouring
to mean different things. Let's further suppose that we determine that the
difference in semantics isn't akin to the ways in which colouring of
English text might conceivably be used (e.g. for emphasis) but is really
fundamental. Let's also further suppose that, taking all things into
consideration, we really do consider this text and come to the conclusion
that the best solution is one that's purely text-based (i.e. no markup or
other higher-level protocal). We're nowhere near having made all these
conclusions, but let's just suppose. So, we identify two things that are
minimally contrastive: a red-and-white-whatsit, and a
blue-green-and-yellow-whatsit. They are two entities and each gets a
codepoint. That's an encoding issue. How they get rendered isn't an
encoding issue.
Of course, at that point, we'd be wanting to consider how to deal with
chromatic issues in text rendering where chromaticity is inherent to the
character and not a matter of user-discretion (for which formatting is
appropriate). But we are not yet at the point of knowing that is even
necessary. And since it would clearly not be a trivial problem to solve
(it's not finding a way to do it that's hard -- it's the huge amount of
secondary implications), I think the silence amounts to a reaction that we
neither are ready to cross that bridge nor do we need to at this time -- in
fact, it's not yet certain that we will ever need to -- and that in the
mean time there are more immediate and real concerns to be dealt with.
- 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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