4 ms·
Prob because a vector image would have visual content but no semantic content. That is to say, no identity (a number), no collation (ordering), no abstract repr
by tempguy9999 7y ago
Prob because a vector image would have visual content but no semantic content. That is to say, no identity (a number), no collation (ordering), no abstract representation ("PHAISTOS_PUNK_WITH_LONG_NOSE_AND_MOHAWK")[0].
Also if you already had unicode machiinery, which you will if you're writing a paper, you'd now need a 2nd mechanism for rendering; the SVG you mentioned.
Unicode is meant to be universal so it makes sense to me.
[0] which is indeed on the disk, although the minoans likely didn't call it that.
- AceJohnny2 7y agoDo the potential users of that codepage know to use it?
- tempguy9999 7y agoI'm sorry, I don't understand the question. it's unicode so AFAIU codepages don't apply. Am I misreading you?
- AceJohnny2 7y agoSorry, I misused "codepage" but meant the unicode block that includes these characters. My question is whether, considering these glyphs were included in Unicode for the purpose of usage as you described, those who would use it be technically sophisticated enough to actually do so? i.e. we built it, but will they come?
- tempguy9999 7y agoIf I gave the impression I was a unicode expert, that was a mistake. I have only done some reading. But from that limited position, such characters are just numbers in the unicode spec. If the appropriate font is installed on the document creators' and document readers' machines, it will render just like any other character such as the unicode you're reading here. If the font isn't present you'll probably get the number printed \u12345 or something similar. But I am not an expert and if one wants to chime in here, please do.
- ken 7y agoWhat semantic content is conveyed by assigning Unicode codepoints, though? The article says it's not even clear that it's a script. How can you make out numbers, or ordering, or meaning? Are there proposals to create a Unicode block for, say, the Voynich Manuscript? There's been much more written about that than this disc.
- tempguy9999 7y agoWell, as I described here. Whatever semantic content we assign to it. I think I see your point - you mean the semantics of the script's creators? Yes, good point, and no not that cos we don't know anything about what they meant, nor likely ever will. Any semantics we assign to it are a number (unicode value), possible collation (ordering), and the name (possibly other stuff, I don't know). So if we found more phaistos disks with punky-mohawk-guy on that, and we decided they were intended by the original creators to mean the same 'character' on all disks, all those glyphs would get the same unicode character. Scholars could then index them by the same 'character', look for relationsips between those characters they've established are the same. More concretely, what a letter is in english doesn't link much to how it looks. For example, the uppercase letters here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gebrochene_Schriften.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gebrochene_Schriften.png are all english but to my eyes, each taken individually, are grotesques and some (like the capital 'H' in Textur font), are illegible to me. Literally I would not guess what letter it is. Yet they're all your common or garden alphabetical letters. So the semantics are, whatever the 'H' looks like, we know what it is, how to sort with it, where to find it in an (english) dictionary, etc. HTH (and IANAExpert)