Proposal to add standardized variation sequences for chess notation

[Martin J. Dürst]

On 2017/04/03 01:27, Richard Wordingham wrote:

> We seem to agree that it should be a graphic modification, rather than
> as semantic modification.  The question I pose is, "Is it just a
> graphic modification in this case?".  I'm not convinced that it is.  A
> player starts with two non-interchangeable bishops.  <U+2657, U+FE01>
> could only refer the white bishop that is restricted to black squares.
> That's a semantic difference.

That applies only to the bishop, and only in standard chess and those 
chess variants that keep the same restrictions. It's easily possible to 
imagine or invent variants where bishops can move differently, and it 
would be weird to use a semantic difference (e.g. different characters) 
for bishops, but a variant selector for other pieces. Also it would be 
weird to try e.g. to "semantically" distinguish the two rooks, even if 
they are two different actual chess pieces on an actual board.


> The immediate parallel that comes to mind is the ideographic square.  A
> sequence of CJK ideographs should be a monospace sequence - and that is
> the major point of most of the ASCII clones with 'IDEOGRAPHIC' or
> 'FULLWIDTH' in their names.  The uniform width is a key part of the
> semantic of the seqeunces being discussed.

The full width/half width distinction mostly is a legacy (roundtrip) issue.

Regards,   Martin.