From: William Overington (WOverington@ngo.globalnet.co.uk)
Date: Fri May 30 2003 - 04:20:51 EDT
Now that Mark Davis has made a statement in the Unicode mailing forum which
seems to imply that the Unicode Consortium is to consider feedback on these
logos, I am writing to ask a few questions please.
1. I tried out the validation procedure on the following page.
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/font7007.htm
This is a not too lengthy web page with just Basic Latin letters. It will
not validate. It is not clear to me what I need to add to the page to get
it to validate. Could there be some very short guidance notes please so
that people can try for validation for Unicode Savvy validation easily. For
example, suggesting the one or two lines of HTML which need to be added in
various circumstances.
2.. What is the situation if a page is encoded entirely properly as far as,
say, using UTF-8 goes, yet also uses Private Use Area characters?
Could there be a special version of the logo with a square section in a
contrasting colour scheme attached contiguously on the right hand side with
PUA on it or even in words "contains Private Use Area code points".
For example, a page could have characters from the Phaistos Disc Script
using the coding scheme from the ConScript Unicode Registry for the Phaistos
Disc Script and one of the fonts which supports that encoding would need to
be used.
For example, a page could have a chess diagram using the code point
encodings described in the following page.
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/chess.htm
If a web page which includes chess diagrams had a Unicode Savvy logo with a
PUA chunk on it, then maybe I could have a "Quest text font will display
this page" logo next to it or below it with a link to the following page.
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/font7007.htm
3. I am concerned about the use of the word savvy, which sounds a bit like
slang to me, and very American oriented. It seems to go against the very
essence of what Unicode is about regarding encoding all of the languages of
the world. If the phrase is seen as an embarrassment then many people may
simply shun it without even telling you. The prospect exists of long
campaigns, maybe one every year, to encourage people to use the Unicode
Savvy logo, aimed at informing people and so on, when in fact they are
already well-aware of the logo and are just shunning it without telling you
that directly.
4. Having recently been told quite strongly by several of the
non-Sarasvati-but-act-like-they-are-without-a-mandate people on the Unicode
mailing list that I should not post a list of Private Use Area encodings, I
now find that several people have decided to post designs for a logo into
the mailing list. Now, I don't mind this, I like a lively discussion group
with things to know about and follow up, and if some of the things are of no
interest to me, well, so what, it's part of being on a list. What is the
situation please? If logo designs are welcome then I feel that that should
be made clear so that people who might not post one because they are not
sure of whether doing so is proper may know that they are welcome to post
one if they wish. Otherwise the Unicode Consortium might consider only some
of the designs which could be available and that would be unfair to those of
us who might quite like to put a design forward yet have wondered whether
posting one in the list is allowed. Should the whole issue of the wording
and the logo design become part of the Public Review series of items?
I wonder if Sarasvati herself, not one or more of the
non-Sarasvati-but-act-like-they-are-without-a-mandate people, could please
make a formal ruling on whether it is permitted to post a list of Private
Use Area encodings to the list and thus record them in the archives. I feel
that it is quite wrong that the
non-Sarasvati-but-act-like-they-are-without-a-mandate people should be able
to shout down progress in the application of Unicode when one of them has
now posted a logo into the mailing list, which would seem to violate his own
non-Sarasvati-but-act-like-they-are-without-a-mandate ruling. As I say, I
don't mind the logo postings myself.
William Overington
30 May 2003
---- Although posting notes about a font or Private Use Area encodings seems not to be acceptable to the non-Sarasvati-but-act-like-they-are-without-a-mandate people, it seems however to be fine to add short comments at the end of posts though, even if they are nothing at all to do with Unicode, so here goes. Think of a number in the range from 1 to 40. Multiply it by itself. Add 41. Take away the number of which you first thought. Check if the result is a prime number.
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