From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Fri May 04 2007 - 16:11:13 CST
At 14:41 -0700 2007-05-04, John Hudson wrote:
>Michael Everson wrote:
>
>>>But I still don't think it is anything other than a glyph variant of SS.
>
>>It is a glyph variant of SS only in the same
>>way that ß is a glyph variant of ss.
>
>I don't think that follows at all, Michael,
>because in the German orthography -- what I'm
>now tempted to call a pseudo-bicameral alphabet
>-- ß and ss are clearly distinct in the
>lowercase state, but they are not distinct in
>the uppercase state.
It follows because I am talking about character
identity, not orthographic rules. Standard German
orthography does what you say. Non-standard (but
smart) German orthography provides roundtrip
casing, ss <-> SS and ß <-> [ß].
>I happen to think they should be distinct in the
>uppercase state -- as, clearly, the inventors of
>the uppercase eszett thought also -- but they're
>not.
In standard German orthography, they are not.
>So the options are to encode the uppercase
>eszett as a quasi-uppercase letter explicitly
>excluded from the standard German orthography,
>or to devise a means to enable this as a display
>variant of the standard German orthography.
There is no shame in encoding things that are not
found in standard orthographies. We have lots of
these sorts of thing.
>>I prefer character encoding for this; I understand you think otherwise.
>
>It is more the case that I have not seen a good
>argument as to why character encoding is better,
>and I can see numerous implementation problems
>with such an encoding that can be bypassed by
>dealing with it as a display issue. I'm not dead
>set against the encoding, I just don't see what
>the overriding benefit is.
I think lots of Latin-script clever-font display
trickery is unnecessary and less preferable to
character encoding.
But then I think that most of the lower-case
Latin letters in the standard which are missing
upper-case pairs should be given their upper case
pairs.
-- Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com
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