Re: OT: Unicode 5.0

staving Paul Bennet:
>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.
It occurs to me that the use of black and red in hieroglyphics would have
deep cultural significance to the ancient Egyptians. "Kemet" means "The
Black Land", the Nile Valley which is made fecund by the silt from the
annual floods. I don't know what the ancient Egyptian for "desert" is, but
it translates as "The Red Land".

Pete