Re: Full Unicode Computer Keyboard

From: JFC (Jefsey) Morfin (jefsey@jefsey.com)
Date: Tue May 10 2005 - 08:31:15 CDT

  • Next message: Hans Aberg: "Re: Full Unicode Computer Keyboard"

    At 07:09 10/05/2005, Donald Z. Osborn wrote:
    >Since it is possible to have more than one keyboard layout installed on a
    >system, and for users to switch among them as necessary, perhaps one approach
    >to what it sounds like you are interested in (pardon if I'm off) would be a
    >suite of layouts, designed with some of the above concerns in mind and which
    >together would cover the unicode range. This might be conceived together with
    >regional keyboards such as for Africa, or separately. In any event, in an
    >ideal
    >world, we would have LED keyboards that can tell us what the key values are in
    >the layout we've selected, and a suite of layouts that can cover the range of
    >unicode characters.

    Dear all interested in keyboards,
    Internet uses "charsets" to define two information together (RFC 2277, by
    Harald Alvestrand).
    - the encoding scheme. By default UTF-8.
    - the rules to build a list of characters. No rule meaning the whole ISO
    10646 list.

    Right now the IETF WG-ltru
    (http://ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html) discusses the extension
    of the RFC 3066 langtags to introduce the "script" information from RFC
    15924. I question this on several grounds:

    1. RFC 2301 considered it and opposed to a confusion between content
    (language) and layout (charset)
    2. ISO 15924 comes from the UNICODE script.txt with some more
    specialisations. They actually name the ISO 10646 partitions associated to
    languages.
    3. I consider there are much more charsets in use or needed than ISO 15924.

         - the first one being the keyboards. With real problems since my AZERT
    keyboard does not support all the legal French characters, so I must rely
    on the goodwill of applications to enter characters sequences correctly,
    what is totally impossible (how do you want a program to know that COEUR
    has a ligature and NOE has not).

         - but there are many others, like Internationalized Domain Name
    (nicknamed "two keyboards names" because people need to enter ".com" in
    ASCII), or other observed in the keyboards and displays variety (for
    example upper cases only) or protocols (lower cases only).

    I am therefore interested in every lists such as script.txt documenting
    different (primarily UTF-8) charsets. I have a cross-language system to
    specify for a worldwide multilingual directory for the future MGN
    (multilingual global network). I need to display the local information with
    a charset corresponding to the callers display/keyboard/printers through
    different communications technologies, including postal services (sending a
    letter).

    I am quite interested in the LED keyboards and displays. We have a serious
    problem with homographs and their use for phishing purposes. It would be
    very interesting to display the charset of a document and to force the
    charset of the terminal. This would lead homographs to show-up instead of
    fooling the user. We could agree that "Ctrl-Windows" would switch from
    Documents charset to Terminal chosen default charset.

    I thank you for your help.
    jfc



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