From: John Cowan (cowan@mercury.ccil.org)
Date: Sat Aug 09 2003 - 23:13:17 EDT
Philippe Verdy scripsit:
> Except that in that case, we are no speaking about something that has
> already been standardized, but only used as a legacy mean to achieve
> some results with mosre or less success.
It *is* part of the Unicode Standard. You want a stand-alone diacritic?
Use SP or NBSP followed by the combining diacritic. It says so, right
there.
Your implementation doesn't work? Complain to the implementor, switch to
another implementation, fix the implementation yourself, or pay someone
to fix it.
> SPACE+diacritic is still a hack, and certainly not a canonical equivalent
> (including for its properties), of the existing spacing diacritics, which
> also do not fit all usages because they are symbols.
It's the spacing diacritics that are a hack, for the most part. The
ASCII ones have, as I said, taken on a life of their own.
> * [OT] This was a shame when ISO adapted the DEC VT charset to
> create ISO-8859-1, but forgot important characters needed for the
> languages that this charset was supposed to cover (like the French
> oe and OE ligatures, and a few characters missing for Baltic languages,
> Icelandic, and Catalan.)
ISO-8859-1 was not meant to cover the whole of Europe; it was part of
a quartet, parts 1 to 4. The fact that parts 3 and 4 didn't work out was
not ISO's fault: it didn't foresee how important European as opposed ot
merely regional data interchange would be. As for oe-ligature, the
French representative to WG3 (or its predecessor) said that France could
live without it.
-- John Cowan jcowan@reutershealth.com www.ccil.org/~cowan www.reutershealth.com "If I have seen farther than others, it is because I am surrounded by dwarves." --Murray Gell-Mann
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