From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Sat Sep 10 2005 - 14:39:23 CDT
At 12:23 -0700 2005-09-10, Mark Davis wrote:
>1. It is not true of "all living languages"; there are some minority
>languages that need additional characters. (Part of the problem here
>is that we didn't apply the generative model consistently enough;
>had we done that, many of these characters could be represented
>right now by sequences.)
Well you'd have to give examples of what you mean by THAT, Mark.
>3. The 'however' is misleading. It is not a deficiency that some of
>what users may perceive of as separate characters are encoded by
>sequences.
No, but it's a problem, because font guys usually precompose, and
only precomposed glyphs are **guaranteed** 'safe' for good,
consistent typography.
>4. Also not a deficiency. If Unicode attempted to encode all
>typographic constructs, it would be a horrible mess. It provides a
>foundation for other mechanisms (CSS, etc) to build upon; they can
>provide typographical constructs. And by 'orthographic constructs',
>you'd have to provide examples of what you mean.
What's a typographical construct, Mark?
> > Some of the properties of characters as defined by the
> > Unicode Standard do not correspond to their behavior in different
> > languages.
>
>5. Again, you'd have to provide examples to clarify what you mean.
He probably means something like Russian-vs-Serbian italic small TE.
>What the Unicode Consortium *does* provide is a mechanism for
>providing language-specific tailorings of specified behavior. Look
>at collation, for example, where the Unicode Consortium supplies a
>default basis for ordering in the UCA, but then also provides a
>repository of language-based tailorings of the UCA in the CLDR.
Mark, we are a lo-o-o-ng way from user-tailorable collation on ANY platform.
-- Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com
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