From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Sat Nov 15 2003 - 15:14:13 EST
From: "Peter Kirk" <peterkirk@qaya.org>
> If a rendering engine doesn't do what it should, it is not for keyboards
> to fix the problem. The point of Unicode is not for typing what one
> displays oneself but to interchange information between different
> systems. So in general the typing and the rendering are done on
> different systems.
I'm not speaking about the way to render Unicode, but to the way a keyboard
can be built to respect the encoding constraints of another standard. Think
about the Latin script for example, not all combinations of dead keys plus
base letters are implemented in keyboard, just because they are generating a
combined character which has no correspondance with a default ISO-8859
character set. Of course you can extend your keyboard to support more
characters, but then, you expose applications with input sequences that
cannot be mapped in a text they are creating within a restricted character
set.
As far as I know, an application has little control on the subset of
character it can accept from an IME, or keyboard driver, and if some
characters in the generated combining sequence are ignored, and some other
are accepted, it creates a new sequence which may not be appropriate in the
target subset.
So clearly this is not a Unicode issue, but an issue with the usability of
keyboards and IMEs with all applications that are assuming the complete
support of the keyboard subset in the text they accept (if you don't know
what I mean, just look at the remaining number of games that are just
interpreting keycodes or that are assuming a US keyboard layout, and that
are hard or impossible to use with their default keyboard control
assignments, as they are mapping for example Alt+digit keystrokes, when some
keyboards will not be able to generate these keystrokes without an
additional shift key modifier, and you'll get a good example about the
usability of a enhanced keyboard in a context where it was assumed that all
keyboard sequences were possible).
You've got similar issues with some APIs that use "keyboard accelerators" or
mnemonics to call menu options. Here again Unicode is not the issue, but
this is another example of where adding support for additional characters on
keyboards is not that simple: there's a compromize to find with its
usability within softwares which were not localized to support them.
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