Re: Hawaiian language site goes Unicode

From: John Cowan (cowan@locke.ccil.org)
Date: Thu Jun 04 1998 - 09:52:38 EDT


> John Cowan began this discussion by asking how U+02BB was chosen, but
> I don't know that he intended to convey that U+2018 would have been
> better (though I don't really know for sure).

I had no such intention. When I asked "how was it chosen?", I meant
to inquire how it was chosen, and nothing more.

FWIW, Cyberbit doesn't implement U+2018 either.

> Please note that, as Ken pointed out, U+2018 is intended as
> punctuation. If you use that as a word-forming character, a browser or
> other app might give you undesireble behaviour (for, say, word/line
> breaks, hyphenation) becuase it is making assumptions about the
> character semantics.

In fact, I think that is unlikely. U+2018 is the preferred character
in English words like "isn't" and "won't", and it is wildly unlikely
that any browser or other text-manipulator would line-break or
hyphenate near it.

(Of course, most English apostrophes are currently U+0027, but that is
a heavily overloaded character and is semi-deprecated.)

> Since U+02BB is intended for "letters of
> alphabets", it is probably a better choice in the long term, even if
> there is narrower implementation for it in fonts at the present time.

Yes. For example, Java programs written using Hawai'ian identifiers
would not work with U+2018, since it is not a letter, but would work
with U+20BB.

-- 
John Cowan					cowan@ccil.org
		e'osai ko sarji la lojban.



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