> http://www.iis.sinica.edu.tw/~wuch/idn/examples/mixinput.htm gives a > very visually powerful demonstration of the problem the working group > has debated over these many months, and I have no doubt that is useful > for many members of the working group to see some of the character > mixtures rather than hear them described. Thank you for your efforts.
Lest those on this list unfamiliar with Chinese be overly impressed with the "powerful" demonstration posted on that site, the islam.gif (2nd example) is *not* a valid representation of the distinctions in characters in question. The first character shown in all 8 lines is the glyph for U+6DF8 and *not* the glyph for U+6E05. The second character shown in all 8 lines is the glyph for U+771E and *not* the glyph for U+771F. The third character shown in all 8 lines is the glyph for U+654E and *not* the glyph for U+6559. So if told to type *exactly* what is shown in each line, the right answer in all 8 cases would be the same Unicode string: U+6DF8 U+771E U+654E. There *are* minute glyph distinctions here in the example, so it is clear that the font used to display these has a different glyph for each code position, but the font designer has *chosen* to make each pair look almost identical, rather than to reflect the glyph distinctions which underlay the separate character encoding. Presumably this is to meet some Taiwan-specific market requirements for font design. But the net effect is to artificially exaggerate the problem being complained about by those objecting to the IDNA handling of Chinese characters. To then advertise these examples as making the problem clear to those on this list who may be less than conversant with the Chinese variant problems I consider to verge on misleading. Those who wish to get an accurate depiction of the differences between the 3 pairs of characters in question should consult the standards themselves: ISO/IEC 10646-1:2000 or the online charts for the Unicode Standard: http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U4E00.pdf --Ken (* O.k., I'll sit back down now. *)
