> to be fair to the unicode people, this decoupling of glyphs and codepoints > is (i think) the most straightforward way to implement some languages like > arabic, where the glyphs for characters depend on their position within a > word. that is, a letter at the beginning of a word looks different from > what it would look like if it was in the middle.
my opinion (not that i'm entitled to one here) is that the unicode guys screwed up. unicode is not consistant. explain why there are two code points sigma. 03c3 greek small letter sigma 03c2 greek small letter final sigma why does german get ä, ö, ü? if you want to take this further, why are there capital forms of latin letters? can't that also be inferred by the font? what's called a ligature in one language is a character in another. i see no consistency. it seems like the unicode committee had a problem with too much knowledge of the specific problems and few actual unifying (sorry) concepts. i think it would make much more sense to put this logic in editors. this would also allow the freedom to use a capital, ligature, final form in the wrong place. like say studlyCaps. i can't imagine english is the only language in the world that gets abused. - erik
