At 6:40 PM -0800 12/6/00, James Kass wrote:
>Consider the "teeth" ideograph(s). (Radical number 211, in
>some radical lists.) Because this is a radical, CJK encoders
>can select the specific desired character:
>U+2FD2 for Traditional Chinese
>U+2EED for Japanese
>U+2EEE for Simplified Chinese
>
>Since anyone encoding U+9F52 might see any of the above
>three versions, my opinion is that encoders (authors) would
>wish to explicitly encode their expected character and would
>do so whenever they have the option.
This doesn't reflect, however, the way people actually use these
ideographs. By and large, the Japanese reader wants to see them
drawn with the Japanese glyph, whether or not the originator was
Chinese.
There are some cases where the specific glyph *does* matter, largely
in personal names. (We had a mildly heated discussion this morning
in the IRG meeting going on about how to show one particular glyph
for precisely this reason.) By and large, however, it is recognized
that the glyph differences do *not* affect meaning and should be up
to the reader, not forced by the originator.
>I believe that they
>should have the option. The abundance of unassigned code
>points offered by additional Unicode planes makes this
>possible and would eliminate the need for a browser
>(or any other application) to "guess" a language in order
>to display material as its authors and users desire.
>
But then why not deunify the English and French alphabets? Or French
and Polish accents? Or Fraktur and Italic and Roman styles of Latin?
-- ===== John H. Jenkins jenkins@apple.com jenkins@mac.com http://homepage.mac.com/jenkins/
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