Re: Greek chars encoded twice -- why?

From: vanisaac@boil.afraid.org
Date: Thu Feb 18 2010 - 14:08:22 CST

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    From: Apostolos Syropoulos (ijdt.editor@gmail.com)
    Date: Thu Feb 18 2010 - 13:27:30 CST

    > 2010/2/18 <vanisaac@boil.afraid.org>
    >>
    >> Unicode is based on reality, not on hypothetical perfection. It is the
    >> result of compromises that place necessity over convenience,
    >
    > Really? What kind of reality is this that ignores the rules of a language
    > that uses a specific alphabet?

    I think, almost by definition, that's exactly what legacy character encodings are. They were workarounds for inferior technology, that ignored language rules for expedience, necessity, and maybe sometimes whim. Unicode, as a superset, inherits all the junk, like a character for Capital A with Ring, and one for the Angstrom sign. It's stupid, infuriating, cumbersome, absolutely necessary, and incredibly easy to deal with. All it requires is realizing that your preconceived notions about how you - or any other sane person - would go about starting from sqare one is not representative of the reality of what the Standard has to work with, and using a normalization algorithm.

    >> .You can choose to rail against reality, or learn to accept it.
    >>
    > Interesting!
    >
    > Α.Σ.

    All you have to do is run NFKC or NFKD. One stock algorithm, and it all disappears.

    Van Anderson

    P.S. I noticed that you conveniently snipped the part of my post that addressed the reality of what the Standard has to deal with. Bad form, my man.



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