From: Doug Ewell (doug@ewellic.org)
Date: Fri Feb 11 2011 - 10:02:19 CST
QSJN 4 UKR <qsjn4ukr at gmail dot com> wrote:
> There are several different applications of the letter cases. They
> are used stylistically, for example, the using a capital or title
> letters in the headers, grammatically, when the capital letter
> identifies the beginning of the sentence, the proper name, any name
> in German, and semantically, for example, in SI units or chemical
> symbols.
This is exactly why it is inappropriate to apply case-change operations
indiscriminately to arbitrary snippets of text. This is not unique to
SI prefixes (or units) or Unicode compatibility characters; it's not
even really a computer problem. It would be just as inappropriate, as
Jukka pointed out, to uppercase a symbol like "ms" which consists of
ordinary letters, whether in Unicode or in handwriting.
> To support all these cases, it would be nice to use special control
> characters in the text, which would indicate where the change in the
> case is admissible and where is not. Or to use for the SI, chemical
> and mathematical notation and - for capitalization of proper names
> (???) - those characters who have no case mapping, U+1D400 etc.
Modifying all existing electronic text to include such an invisible
control character, and requiring all users and processes to enter it
reliably, and modifying all keyboards to include a key for this new
character, doesn't seem particularly likely at this time. Better to
teach users to use common sense when applying text-transformation
operations like uppercasing.
> What the hell good on the stability of the Unicode standard, if it
> excludes the possibility of using it.
Using a character encoding standard does require a modicum of knowledge
about how plain text works.
-- Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA | http://www.ewellic.org RFC 5645, 4645, UTN #14 | ietf-languages @ is dot gd slash 2kf0s
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