Keld =?iso-8859-1?Q?J=F8rn?= Simonsen wrote on 2003-08-10:

> Well, you probably do not want to go for Unicode with all its
> normalisation formas etc, but rather for ISO 10646 utf-8.
>
The question is, when I type some letter with an accent, will the
application recieve a precomposed form (assume there is one) or the
base letter followed by a combining character?  Granted, unicode-aware
programs shouldn't care - but since we want to work well with
unicode-ignorant software (``cat > file``).

Given the popularity of NFC as the preferred form for the web, it
probably makes sense that the keymap should emit precomposed
characters when possible.  However, what about a different keymap
where you have separate keys for typing letters and then adding
accents?  You can handle normalization in cooked mode but you can also
live without it.  In any case, raw mode will expose the keymap details
to the app.

The harder issue is how to handle combining characters on display.
For many people, you can't leave without them.  And you want ``cat
file`` to work equally whether the file uses precomposed or decomposed
forms.  So you don't have choice - you must normalize on display.

-- 
Beni Cherniavsky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
--
Linux-UTF8:   i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive:      http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/

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