... Those other middle dots give
people textual representation alternatives now, if they need to make
distinctions, and textual rendering alternatives, if they need to make
middle dots which display with slightly different heights, sizes, or
spacings, depending on the rendering requirements.
Ken, does Unicode specify height, size and spacing distinctions between the various middle dots which you listed? If I understand correctly, it certainly doesn't do so exhaustively. So in effect what you are suggesting here is that people make and use their own private distinctions between characters which are not defined by Unicode. This sounds very like advising people to ignore Unicode character identiies and properties and do their own thing. Rather strange advice from someone in your position, surely?
Surely, in the current situation and if further proliferation of middle dots is considered undesirable, users should be advised to presume that distinctions between middle dots are not a plain text matter and so should be handled by markup, including language selection.
And if (as I just suggested on the Hebrew list might be true of some variant Hebrew pointing systems) someone finds a well documented script in which a true middle dot and an x-height dot are used contrastively, the correct approach would be either to accept, reluctantly, that at least one new dot needs to be encoded; or else for Unicode to define clearly which existing character should be used for which dot in this script. The worst thing that could happen would be for different text providers to make different and incompatible selections among the existing characters, leading to total confusion. But that seems to be the approach which you, Ken, are advocating.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
