Hello Asmus and others, >>I'm not sure Unicode can be fixed at this point. The flaws may be >>too deeply embedded. The real solution may involve waiting until >>companies and people start losing significant amounts of money as a >>result of the flaws in Unicode, and then throwing it away and >>replacing it with something else.
AF> This sounds nice and dramatic, but misses the point that the kinds of AF> issues you highlighted are absolutely common to *all* character sets AF> containing Latin and Greek, or Latin and Cyrillic characters, suggesting AF> that you are simply grandstanding here, instead of trying to find real AF> solutions to your problem. Oh, it is very well possible to design a character set that supports all of Latin, Cyrillic and Greek without being susceptible to this problem beyond the familiar 1-l-|, 0-O dimension. The main premise is to encode glyphs instead of characters so that one glyph "A" is used in all three of these alphabets. Roundtrip compatibility with legacy character sets would be a problem, though. It looks like there is the decision between kludge A (roundtrip compatibility missing) and kludge B (easier spoofability). However, for URLs etc., roundtrip compatibility is not really necessary, I think. AF> Earlier, you accused Unicode of being in denial about security AF> issues: It is you who is in denial about some underlying AF> realities, among which is that there are security issues that AF> cannot be "fixed" by designing a 'better' character set. I am sure they can be fixed by designing a better character set that is better suited to a given problem. A lot of problems can be avoided by regarding a character set as an application-specific entity to some extent. This is not what we want, of course; we want a universal encoding across all applications. This being our premise, the resulting problems which you cannot possibly deny will have to be dealt with in one way or the other. To me, it seems a better idea to fix problems that arise directly from the way we encode our characters already on the character set level as far as possible, even if it just means notifying people that mixing characters from different alphabets may lead to misinterpretations and to denote common glyph similarities in the standard, such as the glyph "A" or for that part the character "A" being indiscernible in several alphabets. Philipp mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ___________________ Seeing my great fault / Through darkening blue windows / I begin again
