Wireless Connection Symbol

[James Kass]

On 2020-05-27 5:25 AM, Asmus Freytag via Unicode wrote:
> I’ve already said this on the previous PRI, but it bears repeating: QID
> sequences are fundamentally unworkable because they destroy the concept of
> character identity. I firmly believe the UTC is considerably underestimating
> the implications of providing a mechanism that can encode exactly the same
> information in several, mutually incompatible ways. ...

As opposed to the current mechanism in which users cannot encode their 
desired information at all?

Unicode already provides a method for encoding the same information 
incompatibly, the PUA.  The QID emoji proposal seeks to standardize the 
plain-text interchange of any desired unencoded image, which would avoid 
the PUA issues.

There's more than one way to encode LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E WITH ACUTE 
compatibly.  If there were more than one way to encode an image of an 
eohippus in Unicode, they could be considered compatible.

If the concern wrt compatibility is that "image of an eohippus" might 
some day become an atomic Unicode character, somehow conflicting with 
the QID Emoji encoding, then it's suggested that with an existing 
plain-text interchange mechanism nobody would need to propose "image of 
an eohippus" as an atomic character.

It's also suggested that concerns about character identity needn't apply 
to "image of an eohippus" and the like because they haven't any.  "Image 
of an eohippus" is exactly that, nothing more and nothing less.  
Interpreting the image as a meaningful symbol is up to the organic 
intelligence reading the text.  Meanwhile, the intention of the author 
is discoverable by any artificial process, namely that the author 
intended to send an image of an eohippus.