From: John Hudson ([email protected])
Date: Fri May 04 2007 - 15:41:22 CST
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. 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.
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.
> 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.
John Huson
-- Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Gulf Islands, BC [email protected] We say our understanding measures how things are, and likewise our perception, since that is how we find our way around, but in fact these do not measure. They are measured. -- Aristotle, Metaphysics
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