At 09:29 AM 6/25/2003, Rick McGowan wrote:

> What I'm suggesting is that although "cui" <0F45, 0F74, 0F72> and "ciu"
> <0F45, 0F72, 0F74> should be rendered identically, the logical ordering
> of the codepoints representing the vowels may represent lexical differences
> that would be lost during the process of normalisation.

If there isn't a visual difference here, how could there be a lexical
difference? Imagine the age before computers. All you have to go on is
what's on the page.  There isn't an inherent order in those elements; they
could have been written by the scribe in any order. If they appear the
same, you can't assign different meanings -- except by some extra-syllabic
informational context... right?

On the page, you would know -- or hopefully know -- from context. But a search engine or a sorting algorithm looking at the characters presumably needs to know the difference without additional context, hence the character ordering is important.


John Hudson

Tiro Typeworks          www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC           [EMAIL PROTECTED]

If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores,
are labeled New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine,
who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint
Augustine and Stonehenge -- that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism.
                                                            - Umberto Eco




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