From: Rick McGowan (rick@unicode.org)
Date: Wed Aug 06 2003 - 17:26:34 EDT
John C asked...
> I would like to ask the old farts^W^Wrespected elders of the UTC
> which principle they consider more important, abstractly speaking:
> the principle that combining marks always follow their base characters
> (a typographical principle), or that text is stored, with a few minor
> exceptions, in phonetic order (a lexicographical principle).
The first: combining marks always following base characters. And it isn't
a typographical principle, it's a programming principle.
For the notion of "combining marks anywhere nearby" to be workable you
would need at minimum to have 2 classes of combining marks clearly
differentiated: those which come before and those which come after. You'd
have code that now does one-way scanning have to do two-way scanning, etc.
More properly the ur-principle could be stated as "combining marks must be
on *one side* of their associated base characters". Either side could
actually work, if you throw enough baboon colonies at the problem.
But at this stage in history, over a dozen years into Unicode's plan for
world domination, it doesn't make sense to open this particular question at
all. Ever. Except as a research question akin to "which has more inherent
snazz, Dvorak or QWERTY?"
Rick
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