Re: OT: Unicode 5.0

On Thu, 12 Jan 2006 14:05:28 -0500, John Vertical
<johnvertical@...> wrote:

> Paul Bennett wrote:
>> See also the Variation Selectors, which tell a different story, and the
>> Rubric brackets proposed for Egyptian.
>
> Pardon? Those don't seem to appear in the lexicon.
Some Ancient Egyptian texts use color for semantic rather than decorative
purposes. Unicode has always been firmly "Color is a decorative, and NEVER
semantic feature. Unicode will not encode it". For Egyptian, they hedged,
and named "color" as "rubric", and introduced "Begin Rubric" and "End
Rubric" characters, and stated "the display method of rubric is an
undefined behavior, which may be decided by each application as they see
fit". They also introduced some exact character layout codes, which are
also useful for Mayan (and arguably Sumerian), and which are also
antithetical to the unchanging Unicode principles of encoding meaning and
not markup, but which they carefully lawyered their way around with more
careful terminology.

The Variation Selectors are a range of Unicode codepoints shared between
scripts that have several variants for each character, but which do not
occur according to some kind of regular pattern. Ancient scripts such as
Etruscan and Iberian are examples of this, where there are two or more
glyph shapes for certain letters, but those shapes appear to occur
randomly. Given an agreed numbering of each variation, the Variation
Selectors combine with the base character to indicate the actual variant
that occurs in a specific text.




Paul

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