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Re: OT: Unicode 5.0

From:John Vertical <johnvertical@...>
Date:Thursday, January 12, 2006, 22:58
>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