Re: [i18n-activity] Should the character sets be minimum font requirements?

I'm troubled, going forward, about the inclusion of the non-ASCII characters in Latin-1 in the global minimal collection.  While that is certainly justified historically, for many countries, the whole goal of i18n efforts is to allow their populations to exclusively use their own languages and scripts online.  From that perspective, they don't like the requirement to support ASCII very much, but ASCII is easily justified on the basis of protocol element requirements such as the elements of HTML, XML, and assorted transport protocols.   But it is difficult to strongly justify (non-ASCII) Latin-1 on that basis: if the argument is that a given font cannot support all Unicode code points that have graphical representations and therefore that a subset must be chosen, selecting a font that excludes some locally-required glyphs in favor of non-ASCII Latin-1 ones is not an obviously reasonable choice no matter what statistics that are historically biased toward western European languages seem to indicate.

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Received on Thursday, 18 May 2017 17:09:48 UTC