<html>
<head>
<meta content="text/html; charset=windows-1252"
http-equiv="Content-Type">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
Hi Val,<br>
<br>
Terms:<br>
1) dynamic composition - building something from smaller parts.<br>
2) visual decomposition - breaking something down into smaller
visual parts.<br>
3) syntactic decomposition -
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;
charset=windows-1252">
construction rules for identification.<br>
<br>
<br>
I've read a lot of the Unicode documents: official documents as
primary, technical notes as secondary, and critics as third. I've
interacted with several types of Unicode people. I believe I have a
good understanding of what Unicode was in the past and what Unicode
is now.<br>
<br>
I know what Unicode says on paper, but I don't know the inner circle
of the committee process and I don't know the existing font
technology.<br>
<br>
It is impossible to have a perfect solution for Unicode that
satisfies every principle and ideal. Any encoding process will
begin with 1 major principle, and everything flows from that.<br>
<br>
The Unicode experts, from day 1, started from a different founding
principle: they understood visual decomposition. I tried to explain
my syntactic decomposition, but was told it would never make it
through committee. <br>
<br>
For the past 2 years, I've had a series of compromises with the
Unicode process. I'm only happy about the first compromise. We
encode the symbols before the script. This compromise still seems
to be holding.<br>
<br>
The preliminary Proposal incorrectly explained the syntactic
encoding design. A committee member noticed the disparity and asked
for clarification. A problematic compromise was suggested and
quickly adopted to continue the committee process. Just last month,
this compromise failed and there is no proposal design.<br>
<br>
For SignWriting in Unicode, the idea of visual decomposition is in
the initial stages. They have not met reality. They do not have a
font and they have not processed text. I do not know how quickly
their encoding will mature. I'm assuming they'll have several
intermediate phases, rather than just throw something together to
submit in February.<br>
<br>
Visual decomposition may integrate well with existing font
technologies, but visual decomposition is a subset of the higher
Unicode principle of dynamic composition.<br>
<br>
Regards,<br>
-Steve<br>
</body>
</html>