On 3/26/2017 10:33 AM, Michael Everson wrote:
On 26 Mar 2017, at 18:20, Doug Ewell <d...@ewellic.org> wrote:
Michael Everson wrote:
One practical consequence of changing the chart glyphs now, for instance, would
be that it would invalidate every existing Deseret font. Adding new characters
would not.
I thought the chart glyphs were not normative.
Come on, Doug. The letter W is a ligature of V and V. But sure, the glyphs are
only informative, so why don’t we use an OO ligature instead?
If there was a tradition of writing W like omega, then switching the
chart glyphs to that alternative tradition would be something that is at
least not inconceivable -- even if perhaps not advisable.
For letters, their primary identity is not given by their shape, but
their position / function in the alphabet.
That's why making Gaelic style and Fraktur a font switch works at all,
even if that is not perfect (viz, ligatures in Fraktur).
In the Deseret case, making this alternation a font choice would tend to
preserve the content of all documents. Making this an encoding
difference would indeed invalidate some documents.
Finally, if this was in major, modern use, adding these code points
would have grave consequences for security.
A./
