- From: Martin J Duerst <mduerst@ifi.unizh.ch>
- Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 16:40:52 +0100 (MET)
- To: keld@dkuug.dk (Keld J|rn Simonsen)
- Cc: rosenne@NetVision.net.il, www-international@w3.org
Keld J|rn Simonsen wrote: >Martin J Duerst writes: > >> Keld J|rn Simonsen wrote: >> >> >Yes, SC2/WG2 has decided that equivalence tables should not be >> >standardized, as they are culturaly offensive. So why don't we just >> >just live with this decision and avoid them? >> >> Keld - Can you please tell me what would be offensive in such >> tables, and to whom and why? If necessary, please use private >> mail. This is the first time I have heard about it, and I have >> a hard time imagining what it could mean. > >The Danish letters $@FXEfxe(J are not decomposable, as they are letters >of their own right. We had from Dansh Standards a long >battle having the letter Æ recognized as a letter in ISO. >One of the problem we had was that sometimes this was decomposed >into an A and an E and then not printed or displayed >as one letter, but instead in two, and sometimes this wholesome >letter was hyphenated into two letters at the end of a line. > >For Ø and Å we foresee similar problems, such as removing the >perceived "accent" . Anyway there is *not* an accent in these >letters, and you should no decompose these. I see. I understand that the A-E combination is a letter off and by itself, not a typographic ligature, and that it can cause problems if rendered with A and E separated. Quite correctly therefore, it cannot be decomposed, and the Unicode standard does not define any equivalence for it. As for the other two letters, I think the points you rightfully mention are very important, but do not have to do with decomposition equivalence. Displaying something inappropriately is definitely inconvenient and in many cases offensive to the user. Also, removing "accents" can be very confusing and missleading. But this is a different thing from the question of decomposition. Whether a system internally represents A-Grave (or one of the two Danish characters, or anything else) with one codepoint or with A and combining-grave as two codepoints does not or should not in any way influence the appearance. It is just *because* it doesn't affect appearance that it is very important to think about equivalence. So while I agree that bad display can be inconvenient (but in some cases, if it's the only way given limited resources, it might be considered better than nothing) or even offensive, this has nothing to do with the decision whether to internally store things precomposed or decomposed. Regards, Martin.
Received on Thursday, 24 October 1996 10:41:35 UTC