From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Sun Aug 10 2003 - 19:36:17 EDT
On Monday, August 11, 2003 12:27 AM, Kenneth Whistler <kenw@sybase.com> wrote:
> A point I keep trying to make, but which often gets overlooked
> by people trying to code Unicode mechanisms for dealing with
> edge cases, is that the design goal of the Unicode Standard is,
> and always has been, to represent *plain text content*. It
> cannot, and should not, IMO, deal with requirements for
> representing arbitrarily fine distinctions of typographical
> detail in all manuscripts and other documents in all writing
> systems of the world.
Spacing diacritics are not "on the edge" of the standard, when they
are already given a full block and handled there as symbols (not as
letters as suggested in some parts of UAX's), with their own identity
independant of their actual glyphic representation. I am not
discussing about the typesetting of these grapheme clusters but
really about the textual semantics of such combining sequences
with an invisible base character, affecting all their properties and
not fully described in the various standard annexes. Due to the
huge legacy use of SPACE+diacritics in legacy text, and the
already normative parts of some standard annexes, it will be hard
to correct the behavior or change the text of these annexes.
And it's where a new better base character than SPACE could
help solve cleanly the ambiguities.
-- Philippe. Spams non tolérés: tout message non sollicité sera rapporté à vos fournisseurs de services Internet.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sun Aug 10 2003 - 20:03:43 EDT