From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Wed Oct 02 2002 - 18:05:45 EDT
John Cowan responded to Rick:
> > (BTW, I agree with Mark about those ISO 14755 [recte: RFC 1345]
> > abbreviations... They aren't
> > very "mnemonic". Many people have the charts available, so there is no
> > great advantage to using mnemonics over simply using numbers or palettes.)
>
> They are easy to type, and what is more, easy to proofread. (This is the
> same argument I just made defending the ISO/SGML named character entities.)
I agree that *some* of the ideas behind the "mnemonics" in RFC 1345
make sense. The idea of typing "a'" for a-acute, for example, is quite
widespread, and useful in some circumstances.
But RFC 1345 is so full of flaws as a system, that it just falls in
on itself.
By insisting on only using the "portable character set" instead of ASCII,
it can't do the obvious for grave, circumflex, and tilde accents, for
example, so you get:
a! 00e0 LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH GRAVE
a> 00e2 LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH CIRCUMFLEX
a? 00e3 LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH TILDE
instead of the obvious and widely used: a`, a^, a~
Attempting to extend the system to Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, and Arabic
just (in my opinion) results in mnemonics that are harder to remember
than the character names, even. What is the real advantage of "s*", "s=", "S+" and
"s+" over "sigma", "es", "samekh" and "seen" for occasional usage? You end up having
to look up all those "mnemonics" in a table anyway, if you actually
want to use them.
And the system gets even sillier when it is expanded to some arbitrarily
defined subset of 10646 symbols and other characters, resulting in
ample evidence of the inextensibility of a basically two-letter scheme
when attempting to represent a large arbitrary set of things.
Combinations like "'?" are not particularly easier to type than "~" or
even "tilde", and there are many similar examples.
But most of all, in my opinion, the RFC 1345 mnemonics fail of a
fundamental criterion: a very substantial portion of them are just
not *memorable*.
--Ken
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