Wednesday, January 2, 2002
IMHO besides treating Canadian Aboriginal Syllabic (CAS) characters as an
exception, discussion of 2002-DP06 should explore the possibilty of
expanding the MARC-8 set as has often been done before. The first time
in April 1970 when subscripts, superscripts and three lower case Greek
letters were added and subsequently when JACKPHY, Cyrillic, Greek and
seven ANSEL characters (codes C0 to C6) were added. Many current MARC
based systems do not support all these characters, so nonsupport for CAS
would be nothing new.
One approach for adding CAS to MARC 8 would be to define a series
of seven escape sequences of 96 characters each for CAS as encoded in the
Unicode Standard 3.0. An alternative would be to use an already
registered escape sequence: 1B, 25, 47 (per international registration
#196, register page 6.34) to invoke all of Unicode UTF-8 and another to
escape sequence to return to the previous C0, G0, C1 and G1 encodings:
1B, 25, 40 (per ISO 2022, page 40). The former could allow growth of MARC
8 via separate (possibly "private" i.e., agreed on by exchange
parties) escape sequences to include all Unicode characters that appear in
the ALA/LC romanization tables. The other, since it would allow any
Unicode character in a MARC record the would largely eliminate the need
for subsequent character set repertoire expansion. The trade-offs would
seem to be character repertoire control with its maintenance costs
vs. more freedom and thus less maintenance. Others can better assess
their local impact. There may be other possibilities too.
Regards,
Jim Agenbroad ( [log in to unmask] )
"It is not true that people stop pursuing their dreams because they
grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing their dreams." Adapted
from a letter by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
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