From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Sun Apr 23 2006 - 22:44:31 CST
From: "Doug Ewell" <dewell@adelphia.net>
> If we need to encode only those writing systems used by humans on Earth,
> there will be plenty of space left over that could later be leveraged
> into a super-surrogate mechanism for encoding these putative writing
> systems from the planet Zoog. We don't have to do it now.
>
>>> I hope you were not being serious.
I hope that you are not serious too when youthink that I support the idea of keeping space for putative (and never seen) non human scripts...
The main reason that will come is to protect the Unicode encoding space from abuse by other standards with different encoding policies (there are already several pushes to develop glyph encoding standards, and even if Unicode or ISO/IEC 10646 does not support this idea, neither of them will be able to resist when they will cease most of their activities, probably before the next 50 years).
The other reason is that the existing encoding will have become so complex to manage in softwares that a alternate standard will need to be developed, and there will exist a ned to provide roundtrip compatibility between the newer standard and the existing one, without loss of information contained in the new encoding standard.
I think this will be possible to have such extension mechanism because Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646 will not have filled completely its encoding space when this will happen in the next 50 to 100 years.
I am still not saying that existing Unicode PUAs are not enough. more than 2 planes assignes to PUA is enough, but all existing PUAs are unusable for full and stable roundtrip compatibility with a newer standard that would be developed (and notably one that would be supported by ISO or its internationaly approved successors!)
Developing such newer standard won't be easy if full roundtrip compatibility is desired, but don't say now that this won't be possible and that this will never happen. All standards exist as soon as there are enough mutual agreements to use it, or as soon as there's a national regulation that mandates its support (such as GB18030) even if there's a previous standard that covers the same area but with distinct policies...
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