begin quoting Andrew Lentvorski as of Wed, Oct 26, 2005 at 12:17:33AM -0700: > Stewart Stremler wrote: > > >I assert that (english) words can be considered glyphs (think cursive), > >and therefore deserve the same sort of treatment. > > 65536 is slightly too small, but 4 billion is *way* too big. There seem > to only be about 200,000 allocated code points.
Hm. Phrases, too. And a natural place to put fonts, as well. > Of course, once we make contact with aliens, all bets are off ... <grin> [snip - lost attribution?] > >>Actually, not all of those language use glyph-per-word, and the issue is > >>that there is a more compact and efficient representation. People tend > > > >...so we can avoid bloat in our XML documents... > > Umm, is there a more compact and efficient representation than Unicode? > I'm not convinced. 200,000 code points is pretty small to encompass > all the modern languages and many dead ones. Worry about compact representation seems kinda silly in the context of XML. There are trivial changes to arrive at a more compact notation. Don't know of any significant ones. > >True, true. Design by committee tends to aim at making everyone > >equally unhappy. > > Or, in the case of Unicode, it takes into account multiple needs that > most people can't even conceive of. But they left out other very important needs. What's the glyph for a cursive 'hello' in english? And again in american? -Stewart -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
