Re: Mad idea

[Mete Kural <metekural at yahoo dot com>]

Salaam Nadim,

> I'd guess
> unicode would favor incremental changes as opposed
> to major
> overhauls/shifts (just a thought).  

>From my limited understanding of the issue, the
changes that Tom is proposing intend to more clearly
define the currently existing codepoints in the
Unicode Arabic block in order to standardize the way
font technologies render these codepoints. More
specifically the objective is to more clearly define
the contexual behaviour of the ambigious characters
within the Unicode Arabic block. Today, since they are
ambigious, font technologies do not have a clear
standard way of rendering these characters. All in
all, it seems that this is true for only a handful of
characters - we are not talking about the whole Arabic
block. Obviously the behavious of characters such as
beh, teh are clear. However the contexual behaviour of
characters such as various combinations of tanween and
various sukuns and standalone hamza are not clearly
defined. I think that Tom is suggesting that the
contexual be more clearly defined.

So there is really no major overhaul in terms of
"Unicode itself". Tom is not even proposing that new
characters in Unicode are necessary (except maybe one
or two). Unicode's objective is pretty straightforward
- to encode characters, not glyphs. Of course there
has been comprimises from this ideal in the past. But
I think any new proposals should try to follow this
ideal. So the major overhaul is not on the Unicode
side (i.e. encoding side).

The major overhaul that Tom is proposing is for the
font technology side of the issue. But whatever font
technology is used should not impact the Unicode
standard itself - Unicode should continue to encode
characters as it is. So whether you use Tom's
revolutionary font technology, or you use a gradually
enhanced version of today's font technology should be
irrelevant for the Unicode standard. Unicode concerns
itself with the encoding of characters and their
contexual behaviour, not the mechanisms that are used
to do the actual script rendering.

So basically:

Unicode         Font technology         Unicode
defines
defines   -->   renders the        -->  how the result

encoding        encoded characters     should look
like

Font technology takes thoses encoded characters and
renders them into what the Unicode contexual behaviour
definition for each character requires.

I think I had a hard time explaining myself but
hopefully I could communicate something.

Thanks,
Mete