I understand the frustration:
Similar to the frustration of having private, off-list messages replied to in public.
if Unicode had not attempted to define combining classes, which were not necessary to Unicode, all existing combining characters would have been given a CC=0 (or all the same 220 or 230 value). This would have left the compatibility with legacy encodings and with Modern Hebrew, without breaking Traditional Hebrew.
Combining classes are useful and normalisation is a good thing that reduces the number of possible encodings of equivalent character sequences. This is very important and valuable during search and sort operations, and greatly reduces processing time.
I have nothing at all against either normalisation or combining classes.
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
