Tag characters and in-line graphics (from Tag characters)

[Mark E. Shoulson]

I think I've figured out the philosophy WJGO is trying to follow here.

"We should have a way to encode graphics in Unicode"
"We should have a way to encode programming instructions in Unicode"
How about
"We should have a way to encode sound-waves in Unicode"?
Or
"We should have a way to encode *moving* graphics, maybe with sound, in 
Unicode"?

Now, he didn't say the last two, in fairness to him.  But I think that's 
the thinking.  WJGO, not *everything* computers do has to be part of 
Unicode.  Doing so essentially makes *everything* that wants to support 
"Unicode" have to be... well, pretty much *everything* all other 
computers are.  We have graphics formats that encode graphics; they're 
*good* at it.  They're made for it. We have sound formats for encoding 
sounds.  We have various bytecodes for programming--different ones, 
written by different people, that do things in different ways, because 
one size does not fit all.  Unicode can't be the one size.  It was never 
intended to.  Don't make Unicode into an operating system, or worse, THE 
operating system.  It's a character encoding.  For encoding characters.

~mark

On 05/27/2015 12:26 PM, William_J_G Overington wrote:
> Tag characters and in-line graphics (from Tag characters)
>
>
> This document suggests a way to use the method of a base character 
> together with tag characters to produce a graphic. The approach is 
> theoretical and has not, at this time, been tried in practice.
>
>
> The application in mind is to enable the graphic for an emoji 
> character to be included within a plain text stream, though there will 
> hopefully be other applications.
>