Okay, Ken. I'm beginning to get it after reading your thoughtful explanations and after reading through the following two documents (highly recommended to all following this thread):
http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-charreq http://www.w3.org/TR/charmod/ After reading through some of the archives (some pointers to the relevant parts would be helpful, please--something beyond "consult the archives"), it strikes me that normalization, with its severe requirements, is going to eventually so distort Unicode that it will render it nearly unusable. Consider the thread that starts at http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/Archives-Old/UML020/0651.html (from 1999, for goodness sake!): if umlaut had been a later addition to Unicode, no vowel-umlaut code could be allowed to have a decomposition to vowel + umlaut after the umlaut was introduced (else normalization idempotence breaks). Conversely, if umlaut, but none of the composed vowel-umlaut characters, had been in from the start, when the latter were added they would all have to go into the compositions exclusions list (else normalization idempotence breaks). Obviously, neither occurred with umlaut, but the point is, I hope, clear. Normalization will ossify Unicode: it will become harder and harder to accept new, clean encodings. This is truly going to become the tail that wags the dog. My prediction: normalization will eventually force some sort of version indicator to be included in all (normalized) Unicode text. (Weak analogy: much as DTD references are, either explicitly or implicitly, part of all XML documents). Normalization and its applications (such as early normalization for string identity matching) may indeed be the show-stopper (today), so this question may be moot, but I'll ask it anyway: Are there any other uses of combining classes that would break (in ways apart from normalization breaking) if the assignments for the Hebrew vowels were changed? We might as well be sure that we know the entire scope of the issues involved. Ted Ted Hopp, Ph.D. ZigZag, Inc. [EMAIL PROTECTED] +1-301-990-7453 newSLATE is your personal learning workspace ...on the web at http://www.newSLATE.com/
