From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Thu Jan 22 2009 - 14:28:04 CST
On 22 Jan 2009, at 19:37, Mark Davis wrote:
> Every time anyone has any kind of organization of anything, it could
> be considered "prejudical" to someone somewhere.
True, and I understand that your organization may not have the same
requirements as I might have. Nevertheless, the idea that yogh should
be "archaic" (or whatever) and not on a character picker, when I
enountered it in school in Arizona (a pretty ordinary place, in the
late 1970s) seems to me to be wrong. Chaucer is still on the c
> And yet for a character picker there are so very many Unicode
> characters that you have to have some kind of organization or the
> characters you want are difficult to find within a morass of others.
So how will people find the "obscure" ones?
> We considered UCA ordering, the ordering in the charts on http://www.unicode.org/charts/collation/
>
> There are a few problems with that, as you will see if you take a
> look.
> • Especially in the case of symbols or punctuation, it is hard to
> find things
Why start here? I was talking about letters of the alphabet(s). You've
been dividing Latin up into ins and outs. Symbols should (if possible)
be found by category, but that was outside of the scope of the UCD. I
do think punctuation should be together. If not, what do you get?
> • The interleaving of compatibility characters also makes it
> difficult (take Arabic, for example).
You could leave most of those out of course. This is a little bit
reductio ad absurdum. Your list mostly consisted of Latin letters,
including phonetic ones. Those aren't the same category as the Arabic
presentation forms, for goodness' sake.
> • The ordering of scripts is arbitrary.
So? I imagine Latin ought to come first, but even if it came second,
my request is that the Latin characters all be presented in UCD order
(at a mininimum).
> • Using UCA order significantly increases the bandwidth
> requirements. (And carbon footprint ;-) http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/powering-google-search.html)
Awww come on. Really? You don't have to GENERATE the UCA order on the
fly. Right now you're making a table, aren't you? So you generate the
order once for the UCA and then that table gets loaded.
I think it's neat what you're doing, but I don't see that any of the
reasons you've given address my concern at being able to find all the
Latin characters easily.
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com
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