Re: Capital Sharp S in the News

From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Mon Jun 30 2008 - 19:34:40 CDT

  • Next message: David Starner: "Re: how to add all latin (and greek) subscripts"

    > On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 2:31 PM, Leo Broukhis <leob@mailcom.com> wrote:
    > > Isn't the letter in question the same as the rejected (in 2004)
    > >
    > > LATIN CAPITAL LETTER DOUBLE S
    > > (existence as character not demonstrated; would cause casing problems
    > > for legacy German data)?
    >
    > Yes. I wish I could offer you a link to the proposal, but there was a
    > new one made, and it offered more than enough evidence to sustain it
    > as a letter. Apparently Unicode decided that the concerns of casing
    > problems were sufficiently dealt by not having the current double s
    > uppercase to it.

    The earlier proposal had other problems, too -- not least
    of which was claiming this was a "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER DOUBLE S".

    The later proposal more correctly identified it as the
    uppercase form of the SHARP S letter (esszet) and disconnected
    the proposal from the untenable position that it was directly related
    to "SS". As David Starner surmised, the casing stability issue
    was dealt with by simply including no mapping from U+00DF to the
    new uppercase character.

    There was a political difference as well. The original proposal
    was pushed by an individual. The later, improved proposal got
    official support from the German National Body (DIN) in the
    context of ballotting for 10646.

    --Ken



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