Re: New Charakter Proposal

William,

Note the smiley. Ken's suggestion was a tongue in the hollow-skulls
cheek.

Yes, a 2 character sequence is less likely to occur, but is still a
possibility, so your proposal doesn't actually fix the problem. The
usual workaround is for a convention that uses characters with special
semantics (ie metacharacters) to have an escape mechanism to indicate
when a metacharacter is not to be treated as such. So perhaps 2 skull
and crossbones in a row will be used to nullify the special meaning of
one such character and together represent a single printable character.

Of course, the consortium could assign another character for the special
purpose, but there are so many special purposes that would then require
character assignments, it would be come difficult for an application to
take them all into account. It is better to let higher level protocols
take over, where such abilities are needed or desired.

As for the influence of posting a suggestion for character usage, I
think you have made your point now, perhaps we don't need to keep
restating it. Others have suggested this list is not a good place to
post and suggest conventions for individual or non-standard use, since
this is a list for standardization and subscribes to a standardization
process. The Charman list was created for the alternative process.
However, that suggestion doesn't seem to have had any influence...



tex