>Well the Swedish alphabet includes ä but not à. The last is an
"a with an accent above", while ä is a letter in itself. Just
because the glyph looks like an "a with two dots above", it is
not. It is wrong to decompose a character just because its
glyph looks like being composed of an accent and an other
character.
While I can appreciate that a Swede wants to experience certain
behaviour for a-umlaut, or any other character - and I agree
that it should be this way, there is a fallicy in the argument
here: There is an invalid assumption that the behaviour
experienced by a user is necessarily determined by the way data
is encoded. Certainly the encoding of the data *may* impose
limitations on what behaviour it is possible to provide to the
user, but in the case of whether to encode a-umlaut as a single
character code or as a sequence of two character codes, no
limititations of consequence are involved. With either approach
to encoding, it remains for implementers to provide the correct
behaviour with regard to presentation, input and editing, case
mappings, searching, sorting, etc. With either approach to
encoding, there is no reason at all why an implementer can't
provide the kind of user experience that a Swede would expect.
Again, this situation is no different from, e.g., Spanish ch.
Peter
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:51 EDT