MC>And indeed, when we are dealing with extinct languages, or
with texts that may possibly contain hidden messages, we cannot
be totally sure that what seems to be an arbitrary graphical
choice isn't really a meaningful feature. So it makes sense to
have a device to encode the graphic difference, just to be as
literal as possible. And it makes sense to have it in plain
text, because a character set is a character set, not a word
processor, and it should not rely too much on font
technologies... Who said that the primary thing I want to do
with my text is to display or print it, rather than, say, store
it in a database for doing a statistical research?
If we start talking about encoding in Unicode all presentation
distinctions in ancient documents that might prove to be
significant (but also might not), won't we end up turning this
character encoding standard into a glyph encoding standard?
Maybe this rhetorical question is reactionary and that is could
be feasible to add such to Unicode in a controlled manner. Just
sounds scary.
Peter
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