From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Mon Jun 23 2003 - 20:09:33 EDT
> At 23:33 +0200 2003-06-23, Philippe Verdy wrote:
>
> >What about the many symbols used to signal how clothes can be cleaned,
And Michael Everson responded:
> A well-defined semantic set that I think deserves encoding. :-)
If what you mean is:
http://www.waschsymbole.de/en/index.html
then some of those are *already* representable using currently encoded
symbols:
U+24B6 CIRCLED LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A
= dry clean with all standard methods
U+24C5 CIRCLED LATIN CAPITAL LETTER P
= dry clean with perchloro-ethylene
U+24BB CIRCLED LATIN CAPITAL LETTER F
= dry clean with fluorine-solvent
U+29BB CIRCLE WITH SUPERIMPOSED X
= do not dry clean
U+25B3 WHITE UP-POINTING TRIANGLE
= bleaching allowed
And "delicate" is the sequence <25CB, 0332>, a large circle
with an underscore. And so on.
But as you can see if you visit that page, there is more than
one standard for such icons -- a European standard and a
Canadian standard. And for all we know, there might be others
as well. The Canadian standard also color-codes the icons,
which was one of Philippe's criteria for where these kinds
of things clearly go over the line of what is appropriate
for encoding as characters.
And the "sethood" of a collection of arbitrary icons is not
sufficient criterion for the "characterhood". Just because
a group of symbolphiles can investigate and come up with
a collection of these things, and just because these things
are *printed* on labels for clothing does not ipso facto make
them characters, any more than the various symbols and
logos related to food (and other) packaging.
Look again at the icons listed above at that site. Clearly, as for
many such symbologies which are supposed to communicate
*WITHOUT* language, we have interesting little pictographic
logics embedded in the symbols to convey meaning. For
instance, a pictograph of a hand iron with one, two, or
three dots inside, supposed to convey the degree of heat
of the iron. Or washtub pictographs with digits in them
to convey water temperature (in degrees Celsius), or with
a pictograph of a hand inserted to indicate "hand wash only".
Such collections of icons are, generically, part of an ongoing
process of the reintroduction of pictographs and (true)
ideographs into writing, to solve commercial and regulatory
issues of globalization. Pictographs proliferate across
Europe because "Europe" the commercial and regulatory
entity is becoming so multilingual that it is utterly
unwieldy to require warnings, labels, and other important
captions (and even instructions) in language-specific
writing.
The alternative--to force everyone to use a dominant (or a
few dominant) official languages--is not PC in Europe. Heck,
it isn't even PC in the U.S., although it is almost
official policy here.
But the implication of this ongoing development needs to be
*considered* by the character encoding committees -- not
just be catered to, by "accident", as it were, by merely
encoding as characters whatever nice little set of iconic
symbols happens to attract our attention this week. There
is a serious question here regarding what is plain text
content and what is this "other stuff" -- an ongoing
evolution of iconic and pictographic symbols that are
intentionally, by design, disanchored from any particular
language, and are instead intended to convey *concepts*
directly.
I think we are at serious risk of "getting it wrong" if we
just keep encoding sets of icons and pictographs as
characters without clear evidence of their use *like*
characters embedded in what is otherwise clearly plain
text context.
What is obvious is that all this stuff is in rapid ferment
right now. Hundreds of agencies and organizations make these
things up for all kinds of purposes, and which ones catch
on and last and get used with text remains to be seen, in
many instances. Further, looking a little more longterm,
it is unclear where this stuff is headed over the next
century. Will such symbols remain disjunct and be very
product- or situation-specific, while turning over rapidly
as technology or products or regulatory environments
change? Will such symbols evolve towards a global,
standardized, iconography-without-words, existing as a
kind of universal visual sign language for the
communication-impaired who don't share a common language?
Will major existing writing systems evolve to incorporate
more and more such symbols (either individually or globally)
in a kind of mass reintroduction of pictographic and
ideographic principles into writing systems?
I don't know the answers to these questions. But I don't
think that we should, as character encoding specialists,
behave as if they don't matter for what we do. I don't
think it is appropriate to just take a "Gee whiz! Let's
encode that cute set of symbols!" approach to every list
of these things that comes along, without considering
more carefully what the Unicode Standard is for and
how it is going to have to interact with these kinds
of symbols in the future.
--Ken
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