[Wikipedia-l] Re: new request for ASL/English wikipedia

[Neil Harris]

As a matter of interest, a few moments of Googling finds this:

http://www.mail-archive.com/unicode@unicode.org/msg04506.html

Unfortunately, none of these scripts appear to have been Unicoded yet.

I suppose we could always use the Private Use Area in Unicode until 
someone gives an official assignment for the characters needed for these 
writing systems.

In particular note this from 
http://www.sciences.univ-nantes.fr/info/recherche/taln2003/articles/rocha.pdf 


"The ISO Registration Authority has approved in February 2000, as an 
addition
Standard, the alpha-3 code sgn to designate deaf sign languages, with 
country names added to identify their nationality. Thus, for instance, 
sgn-FR is the code for the French Sign Language,
and sgn-BR is the code for LIBRAS, the Brazilian Sign Language."

In my opinion, XML encodings seem to me to be very undesirable as a way 
for human beings to encode anything. On the other hand, some shorthand 
for spatial encoding, similar to the a^b and a_b notations in TeX might 
be just what's needed.

-- Neil