On Monday, August 11, 2003 12:27 AM, Kenneth Whistler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> A point I keep trying to make, but which often gets overlooked > by people trying to code Unicode mechanisms for dealing with > edge cases, is that the design goal of the Unicode Standard is, > and always has been, to represent *plain text content*. It > cannot, and should not, IMO, deal with requirements for > representing arbitrarily fine distinctions of typographical > detail in all manuscripts and other documents in all writing > systems of the world. Spacing diacritics are not "on the edge" of the standard, when they are already given a full block and handled there as symbols (not as letters as suggested in some parts of UAX's), with their own identity independant of their actual glyphic representation. I am not discussing about the typesetting of these grapheme clusters but really about the textual semantics of such combining sequences with an invisible base character, affecting all their properties and not fully described in the various standard annexes. Due to the huge legacy use of SPACE+diacritics in legacy text, and the already normative parts of some standard annexes, it will be hard to correct the behavior or change the text of these annexes. And it's where a new better base character than SPACE could help solve cleanly the ambiguities. -- Philippe. Spams non tol�r�s: tout message non sollicit� sera rapport� � vos fournisseurs de services Internet.
