I know that this will seem small for most people as it won't really
affect people unless they are in the coding level of things, but I
have to agree that this change is best even when it may be hard for
some to change with. (Like my poor blog that I have not been keeping
up even though it is on my list. HA!) I am sure it will all work out
for the best. Thanks for giving a heads up. ;-)

Adam

On Jun 1, 2010, at 2:00 PM, Valerie Sutton wrote:

> SignWriting List
> June 1, 2010
>
> Hello Steve -
> You are such a generous and brilliant programmer, and we are
> grateful for all your hard work. This sounds like a good change
> towards possible Unicode acceptance someday and I think it is
> wonderful!
>
> For all the programmers out there, stability with the symbols and
> coding is coming soon - This is apparently a necessary change, and
> it is Steve who has chosen to do this, and I am following his lead
> willingly ;-)
>
> And thank you, Steve, for your caring and sharing with everyone -
> you really create magic for us daily... There have been positive
> responses on my Facebook page about the new SignWriting Wiki today -
> I was really pleased to see it -
>
> SignWriting Wiki
> http://www.signbank.org/wiki
>
> Val ;-)
>
> ------
>
>
> On Jun 1, 2010, at 1:49 PM, Steve Slevinski wrote:
>
>> Hi List,
>>
>> This is a technical discussion. Nothing is going to change
>> regarding the writing system. The change is only data related.
>>
>> Back in 2008, I made a poor design choice for Binary SignWriting.
>> I needed to define what was a character for the encoding model. I
>> decided that each symbol should be a character. Some others
>> (Stuart Thiessen, Michael Everson, members of the WLDC, ...)
>> thought that each BaseSymbol should be a character with an
>> individual symbol being defined as a BaseSymbol character with one
>> or two modifying characters.
>>
>> Encoding with symbol characters seemed the better choice, rather
>> than using 3 times the amount of data to say the same thing. I was
>> wrong. My choice made searching by BaseSymbol much more
>> difficult. I was forced to pre-process the data before I could
>> search. This was wasted effort. I realized the error of my ways
>> when I was reading a discussion of searching with Unicode.
>>
>> I need to fix my poor design choice and reencode the ISWA 2010 with
>> BaseSymbol characters and modifiers. I then need to refactor the
>> character encoding model. This should be a quick fix I'll have
>> ready by Friday, but it changes BSW once again. Hopefully for the
>> last time.
>>
>> On the bright side, this makes it easier for inclusion in Unicode.
>> With my previous encoding, I required an entire Unicode plane of
>> 65,000 characters. With the new encoding, I only need 1,280
>> characters. This is a much better number.
>> Years ago, Michael Everson worked with Unicode for the tentative
>> acceptance of SignWriting into the standard. If you look at the
>> Unicode roadmap for the Supplementary Multilingual Plane, you'll
>> see that Sutton SignWriting has 4 rows set aside awaiting a
>> proposal. These 4 rows represent 1024 characters. With the new
>> encoding, I can create a proposal that requires 5 rows. Much more
>> reasonable that an entire plane.
>> http://www.unicode.org/roadmaps/smp/
>>
>> Sorry to any and all programmers / users this will inconvenience,
>> but it is a needed change.
>>
>> Regards,
>> -Steve
>>
>