Subject: I-D Action: draft-slevinski-signwriting-text-00.txt

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 05 Nov 2012 12:30:06 -0800

A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts directories.

	Title           : The SignPuddle Standard for SignWriting Text
	Author(s)       : Stephen E Slevinski
	Filename        : draft-slevinski-signwriting-text-00.txt
	Pages           : 49
	Date            : 2012-11-05

Abstract:
   For concreteness, because the universal character set is not yet
   universal, and because an international standard for the internet
   community should be documented and stable, this I-D has been released
   with the intention of producing an RFC to document the character use
   and naming conventions of the SignWriting community on the Internet.

   The SignWriting Script is an international standard for writing sign
   languages by hand or with computers.  From education to research,
   from entertainment to religion, SignWriting has proven useful because
   people are using it to write signed languages.  The SignWriting
   Script has two major families: Block Printing for the reader and
   Handwriting for the writer.  The script encoding model presented in
   this document evolved from the Block Printing half of the SignWriting
   Script.

   The SignWriting Text encoding model encompasses the Block Printing
   family of the SignWriting Script.  The plain text model has been
   stable since January 12th, 2012.  The rich text model is currently
   approaching a usable beta.

   The ad hoc graphemes of informal SignWriting were first created in
   1974.  Ad hoc graphemes are still used in the handwriting family.
   The standardized symbols of computerized Block Printing text began in
   1986.  After several generations of writers and standardized
   symbolsets, the ISWA 2010 has been optimized and refined as a 16-bit
   coded character set with several isomorphic encodings based on an
   ordered hierarchy with 6 degrees of significance.  The International
   SignWriting Alphabet 2010 is a mathematical symbolset that has been
   stable since its initial release on May 11th, 2010.

   The SignPuddle Standard for SignWriting Text is an open and freely
   available encoding model for sign language as text.  The licenses
   include the Open Font License for the fonts, Creative Commons by-sa
   (Attribution, Share Alike) for the documentation, and the GPL for the
   software implementation.  The technological infrastructure is 63%
   completed and should be fully realized by the time this I-D has
   become an RFC.  SignPuddle Online contains almost 1 million examples
   of 2-dimensional signs written by the internet community.  Each
   logogram has a mathematical name which describes the freeform
   placement of the symbols.  These strings are the written record of
   the sign.  This standard and emerging infrastructure are used for the
   sign language Wikipedia project on Wikimedia Labs.  This standard is
   being integrated with the SignTyp linguistic coding system developed
   by Rachel Channon through an NSF grant.  This standard was the origin
   for the alternate Unicode proposals.

   For Unicode, the current use of the Private Use Area font characters
   is documented.  A character proposal for plane 1 is included that is
   isomorphic with the characters that are currently used by the
   community.

   Three appendices discuss additional topics to the standard.  The
   first discusses the Modern SignWriting theory and example document,
   stable since January 12, 2012.  The second discusses the founding
   principles of Cartesian SignWriting: a script encoding model for
   SignWriting Block Printing.  The third discusses a common framework
   for written sign language grammar.

   This memo concretely defines a conceptual character encoding map for
   the Internet community.  It is published for reference, examination,
   implementation, and evaluation.  Distribution of this memo is
   unlimited.

The IETF datatracker status page for this draft is:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-slevinski-signwriting-text

There's also a htmlized version available at:
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-slevinski-signwriting-text-00

Internet-Drafts are also available by anonymous FTP at:
ftp://ftp.ietf.org/internet-drafts/