Because these two characters are unified, the composition software needs to
be smart enough to know that a word can be divided between two vowels when
one of them has a diaeresis mark, but not necessarily if the same mark is
intended to serve as an umlaut.
The argument that alphabetic characters are pronounced differently in
various languages but still have the same code point misses the point of my
original question which is why unification when the umlaut and diaeresis
have different basic functionalities.
The illustration of the period and the decimal point being unified does not
make a good argument for unification, because in fine typesetting, the
decimal point is sometimes (depending on the design of the type) slightly
smaller than a period, and sometimes it occupies a different tabular width.
I am not arguing for a change in the encoding scheme. I am just attempting
to become enlightened.
Donald Figge
//
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