"Replacing" writing systems (was: Re: Labelling Vai Keyboards)

Peter T. Daniels <grammatim at worldnet dot att dot net> wrote:

>>>> Some members of the Empire have created the Universal Character
>>>> Set, whose brief it is to represent in interchangeable form all of
>>>> the world's writing systems.
>>>
>>> Then those writing systems just go away? I suppose computer
>>> engineers would think that was a Good Thing.
>>
>> I'm just dying to know how you got from Point A to Point B here.
>>
>> How would creating a computer encoding for a writing system cause the
>> writing system to go away?
>
> Someone (you snipped the attribution)

Michael Everson

> said all the world's writing systems would become represented
> interchangeably. How would you do that other than by replacing all
> the individual writing systems?

That's not really what he said. He said all of the world's writing
systems could be represented "in interchangeable form." That means text
written in any of the world's writing systems could be included in an
e-mail message, or a Web page, or a Word or Acrobat document or
whatever, and "interchanged" via e-mail or the Web or whatever, without
using font hacks. It has nothing to do with "interchanging" the writing
systems with each other.

--
Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/