Re: combining: half, double, triple et cetera ad infinitum

Thank you Asmus,

I made many here very angry. They have put in a lot toward bringing up the
standard, and therefore, it is understandable. Evidence in these things can
never be proven, it only makes people madder. Besides, I worded wrongly to
give the impression that it is the only motive. That is not so. Many
volunteers sweated through. On the other hand, no company would send people
to work at Unicode if they did not have an economic interest.

I should not have even said anything here as I know that there is an
alternative approach that does not hurt Unicode and hopefully its fans. It
is the combination of the most viable and stable portion of Unicode, which
is Latin-1 or SBCS and the Open Type standard. Standards compliant and
elegant solution. See it here:
www.lovatasinhala.com/
Do not use IE. If you use Firefox, sometimes you need to pick another page
to see the complex script.

On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 2:29 PM, Asmus Freytag <asmusf_at_ix.netcom.com> wrote:

> On 11/14/2011 7:30 AM, Naena Guru wrote:
>
> Unicode was created for a commercial reason, particularly for the benefit
> of its directors.
>
>
> This statement, not backed up by evidence, indicates a rather rudimentary
> understanding of the forces that were behind the creation of the universal
> character set. Coming as it does without details, it doesn't add much to
> the discussion.
>
> I can understand that some people are frustrated, when, over two decades
> after the basic design was hashed out, the implementation is still not
> seamless.
>
> The reason for that has to be sought in the inherent complexity of writing
> systems. Even apparently very simple writing systems can have surprising
> complexity when you try to support all areas of use and in high quality
> typography.
>
> Unicode is not just a character set, it provides a common framework for
> organizing and formalizing much knowledge about writing systems. As a
> result, there is now far more information and more accessible information
> about writing systems than when Unicode was started. Had all this
> information been available 20 to 25 years ago, there's a fair chance that
> the design of a universal character set would have differed in some aspects
> from what we now know as Unicode.
>
> But even with the benefit of such hindsight, the sheer complexity of
> writing systems remains. This complexity means that there will most likely
> never be any implementation that supports all writing systems to their
> fullest (highest quality). Every practical implementation will subset
> somewhere, and that means there's no guarantee that any two implementations
> will faithfully interoperate.
>
> It might be that a different design would have made some implementations
> easier, but I strongly suspect that the limitations I described here are
> fundamental, so that the expectation would be that a different design would
> have merely made other tasks more difficult while making certain ones
> easier.
>
> A./
>
Received on Mon Nov 14 2011 - 16:41:20 CST