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Hi SignWriting list, Before the end of this year, I was hoping to announce that we were going to be on the February 2012 Unicode ballot with my syntactic decomposition of the ISWA 2010. This was going to encode Valerie's chosen SignWriting symbols, each with an international meaning. There was no agreement on higher level script layout. We wouldn't be able to write with the full script in Unicode, but we would be able to discuss the modern SignWriting symbol set in plain text regardless of the higher level encoding. It was going to form a common foundation between historic SignWriting and Unicode SignWriting. This, unfortunately is not going to happen in the near future. This is in stark contrast with the amazing search breakthrough I had in October of this year. The difference isn't a few times faster, but several magnitudes of order faster. Even without normalized data, I can search hundreds of thousands of signs and find exact matches or approximate matches. We can have real time auto-complete, suggested spellings, and meaningful normalization tools. The solution to the final piece of the puzzle was regular data that could be processed with simple regular expressions. Blazing speed and meaningful results for all platforms, devices, databases, and programming languages with a simple, flexible and powerful abstraction layer. Based on formal and regular math, my work has nothing to do with Unicode. It utilizes a 16-bit font and an ASCII encoding. It is the end result of 7 years of trial and error with a beautiful script and a simple mathematical model. I am ready to put the unstable path of development behind and start a solid future based on a mature stable public standard. I am preparing that standard as a 12 part series to be ready on 1/12/12. This will form the basis for the standard. http://signpuddle.com I am finalizing SignPuddle 2.0, which will use the same user interface as previous versions, but incorporates the latest search breakthrough. The form used to encode sign words as strings is final. Any changes will be a different major version. The XML files used to store the dictionaries and documents are defined with the SPML dtd. The ISWA 2010, sign words, and the SPML files are the elements of the stable public standard. SignPuddle 2.1 will be a jQuery (JavaScript) update for the editors and user interface. It will embrace modern browser support. I am considering a series of add-ons to the Yii Framework. SignPuddle 2.2 will be for touch devices and deal with the user experience of writing and editing. Both iOS and the Android platforms will be targeted. The SignWriting Image Server 2 is an unstable development version. I will post the code on Github soon, but major parts of the code are not compliant with MSW v1. The SignWriting Image Server 3 will be a standard compliant implementation of Modern SignWriting v1. It will support viewing, editing, searching, sorting and more. Development will be based on SWIS 2 and start early next year. The viewer section will be production server ready and available as a MediaWiki plugin. So that I can compartmentalize Unicode, I have divided the SignWriting Universe for my own sanity. Modern SignWriting v1 ------------------- ISWA 2010 ASCII encoding Unicode: private use area Syntactic decomposition Historical foundation International corpus Full text processing Stable design specifications Modern SignWriting v2 ------------------- Unicode encoding Visual decomposition Initial design stages The Unicode process is still alive and kicking, but they will not have anything to propose for this coming February. They are starting over with a visual decomposition of the ISWA 2010. This may lead to better integration with the Unicode libraries. The current goal is to support the ISWA 2010, so we may end up with a common foundation yet. I've started 2 discussion groups on LinkedIn: one for each version of Modern SignWriting. If you're interested in an in depth discussion, or know someone who might be, join one of the groups. http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Modern-SignWriting-v1-discussion-4209083 http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Modern-SignWriting-v2-discussion-4209106 If you like what SignPuddle has done in the past or you are excited about what we'll do in the future, consider helping me build my online reputation and network. http://facebook.com/people/Stephen-E-Slevinski-Jr/692219249 http://linkedin.com/in/slevinski http://twitter.com/slevinski https://github.com/slevinski Regards, -Steve