From: Asmus Freytag (asmusf@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Sat Apr 24 2004 - 19:15:29 EDT
At 06:30 AM 4/24/2004, Peter Constable replied to Peter Kirk:
>problems do arise if there is more than one combining character
> > between the base character and the VS and they are not in canonical
> > order. But this is a marginal case which can be avoided by ensuring
>that
> > canonical order is always used.
>
>If data is always encoded in canonical order, then having a VS within
>the combining mark sequence wouldn't create any normalization problems,
>that's true. But you well know that people do not want their Hebrew data
>in canonical order. Even if they did, it couldn't be guaranteed.
More simply put, if all data was always normalized, we wouldn't need
normalization ;-).
Having character sequences that can't be normalized is not a 'marginal case'.
Furthermore, one of the defining characteristics of a VS character is that
there must be a sufficiently large number of circumstances where it's OK to
ignore its presence altogether. If there isn't, and if there's a strong
semantic distinction between the character and its variation, then it's
really not a good case for a VS - one should propose a new character.
A./
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