Re: Display of Isolated Nonspacing Marks (problems with UAX#29)

From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Sun Aug 10 2003 - 21:44:13 EDT

  • Next message: Jill.Ramonsky@Aculab.com: "RE: Newbie Question - what are all those duplicated characters FO R?"

    Philippe Verdy <verdy_p at wanadoo dot fr> wrote:

    > Note that these two ZW and SP classes of characters are *normative*.
    > Another proof that SPACE+diacritics is really a hack causing lots of
    > problems in the Unicode main standard and its standard annexes.

    Has it occurred to anyone yet that the very *concept* of spacing
    diacritics is a hack? Spacing diacritics are used to conduct a sort of
    meta-discussion about characters, as in "A base character o is combined
    with an acute accent ´ to create ó." They are not part of the normal
    writing systems of most natural languages.

    It is as if I were describing the two typical glyphs used for lower-case
    g, the one with "one bowl" and the one with "two bowls," but actually
    showing the separate, constituent pieces of the glyphs instead of using
    words to describe them. They are interesting things to talk about, but
    not necessarily things that need to be encoded in plain text.

    -Doug Ewell
     Fullerton, California
     http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sun Aug 10 2003 - 22:31:40 EDT