>Companies frequently make up fonts with 'private' codes in them.
>Xerox has a font with the Xerox logo, the Xerox private data stamp,
>etc. The mapping from code to character in private fonts could well be
>handled by a 'special' character in the system character set that
>wouldn't be part of the document character set.
A similar concern, re. Japanese companies, was contained in
Gavin's paper. I hope he has eliminated or corrected it in
the meantime.
Most of these things are primarily images, and are only defined in
fonts because of convenience. A prototypical example are the
coursors in the X Window system, which are in a font, but are
not transmitted as text.
HTML 1.0 already has a very nice way to use such additional
images, namely as inline images. Everybody is using it very
creatively, you see tiny "New" labels and whatever all over
HTML documents. And these things can even be in full color,
which you don't get with fonts. That the representation
has to be changed somewhat (i.e. from a single character
to <IMG...) is not something to worry about, as a conversion
between raw text and HTML is always necessary.
So I see absolutely no reason to worry about something
now for HTML 2.0 which can already be done in HTML 1.0
better than in any other setting!
>Similarly, mathematicians and physicists frequently make up special
>symbols. Assigning these codes for a 'special' system character set
>would actually make sense. I'd what the special symbol to appear
>larger in a <h1> than in the body, etc.
Same as above, plus:
- These symbols extremely rarely go into a title.
- Guess we have to work first on displaying math formulas with
"standard" math symbols. Of these, Unicode can deliver
more than an good average formula editor. When we have
that, we can begin to worry about additional symbols.
Regards, Martin.