From: Ernest Cline (ernestcline@mindspring.com)
Date: Tue May 04 2004 - 15:27:51 CDT
> [Original Message]
> From: African Oracle <oracle@africaservice.com>
> To: <unicode@unicode.org>
> Date: 5/4/2004 7:04:48 PM
> Subject: Just if and where is the then?
>
> If a can have U+0061 and have a composite that is U+00e2...U+...
> If e can have U+0065 and have a composite that is U+00ea...U+...
>
> Then why is e with accented grave or acute and dot below cannot be
> assigned a single unicode value instead of the combinational values
> 1EB9 0301 and etc....
>
> Since UNICODE is gradually becoming a defacto, I still think it will not
> be a bad idea to have such composite values.
>
> Dele Olawole
Take a look at the Unicode Stability Policy [1]. While it does not make
it impossible for there to be a Unicode character LATIN SMALL LETTER E
WITH DOT BELOW AND ACUTE ACCENT that would decompose to
U+1EB9 U+0301, such a character would have to have the Composition
Exclusion property so that it would not appear in any of the Unicode
Normalization Forms. A number of other standards, such as XML expect
the data they contain to be handled in normalized form, hence even if
the precomposed form were available, most software would still prefer
to work with the unprecomposed form. The result is that unless there is
another official character standard that has LATIN SMALL LETTER E
WITH DOT BELOW AND ACUTE ACCENT as a character, there is no
benefit to be gained by encoding such a character in Unicode. Even
then, the benefit is very small as it is only that a transformation from a
single codepoint of that other standard into a single codepoint of the
Unicode standard could be done. That was an important consideration
when Unicode was getting started, but is not particularly important now.
[1] http://www.unicode.org/standard/stability_policy.html
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