Re: OT: Unicode 5.0

>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
Thanks for explaining; I feel slightly better-informed again!

John Vertical