Private Use areas (was: Re: Thoughts on working with the Emoji Subcommittee (was ...))

[Doug Ewell via Unicode]

James Kass wrote:

> As a caveat, some Unicode cognoscenti express disdain for the PUA, so
> there would be some people who would call a PUA solution either batty
> or crazy.

I'm concerned that the constant "health warnings" about avoiding the PUA
may have scared everyone away from this primary use case.

Yes, you run the risk of someone else's PUA implementation colliding
with yours. That's why you create a Private Use Agreement, and make sure
it's prominently available to people who want to use your solution. It's
not like there are hundreds of PUA schemes anyway.

Yes, you will have to convert any existing data if the solution ever
gets encoded in Unicode. That happened for Deseret and Shavian, and
maybe others, and the sky didn't fall.

People forget that it was the PUA in Shift-JIS, by Japanese mobile
providers, that provided the platform for emoji to take off to such an
extent that... well, we know the rest. If private-use is good enough for
a legacy encoding, it ought to be good enough for Unicode.
 
--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, CO, US | ewellic.org