Windows keyboard restrictions

[philip chastney]

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On Thu, 6/8/15, Julian Bradfield <jcb+unicode at inf.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
 
.> On 2015-08-06, Richard Wordingham
 > <richard.wordingham at ntlworld.com>
 > wrote:
 > > That depends on the availability of Tavultesoft Keyman.  The UK has been
 > > discussing whether a certain user-perceived character should be encoded
 > > as a single character in a new script.  Users ought to have this
 > > character on their keyboards, but there is a worry about technical
 > > problems if it is encoded as a sequence of three characters, i.e. six
 > > UTF-16 code units.  If Windows easily supports a ligature of six UTF-16
 > > code units, then one argument for encoding it is eliminated.
 
 > Unicode is supposed to be for the (sadly probably rather short) life
 > of human civilization, until we have no more need for text. Using an
 > ephemeral property of an ephemeral operating system for ephemeral
 > computers in an encoding argument makes no sense.
 
requirements, too, can be ephemeral

the Oxford English Dictionary aims to include every word in "general use" since Chaucer, where "general use" means it was continuously used in that sense for a minimum of 10 years (or something along those lines)

when "ghettoblaster" was included, the story made it into the newspapers   --  when did you last even see a ghettoblaster?  but still, a definition may be useful for somebody in fifty years' time writing a survey of English novels from the 1980s, so the word's inclusion is justified

I also remember last Christmas being surprised to see a dingbat in use  --  will all those dingbats in Unicode be of use in a few years time?

will emoji?

/phil