Re: OT: Unicode 5.0

>On 1/9/06, John Vertical <johnvertical@...> wrote:
> > ...At risk of threadjack accusations, I'll use the opening to also fire
>a
> > question that's been bothering me for a while - Why does Unicode include
> > several characters multiple times? There are 6561 different ways to
>write
> > "THAI POEM". If capital alpha is different from capital ay just because
>it's
> > used in a different alphabet to write a different language, isn't (eg)
> > Icelandic "A" also a different character then? Are they really purposely
> > randomly tagging unnecessary etymological/usage information to symbols,
>or
> > is it that they just fudged it up initially (for whatever political
>reasons)
> > and can't fix it at this stage any more?
>
>This is because Icelandic uses the same /script/ as English. Greek
>uses a different /script/, therefore capital alpha gets its own
>encoding, while Icelandic ay is encoded as the same as English ay.
My argument is that Latin, Cyrillic and Greek capital letters are
essentially one and the same script.
...Not that I see a point in differentiating by script anyway. I would just
stick with defining glyphs (shapes) and let the users sort out the meaning.


>Unicode certainly has fudged a bunch of stuff up initially, and
>unfortunately they can't fix it now. (One thing in particular, I think
>they should have encoded small caps a long time ago. One of the
>proposals that was linked to included a small-cap F and S, and
>mentioned that the only other small caps left unencoded were Q and X.
>Interesting, I thought, so I went on a hunt for all the small caps
>(other than F, Q, S, and X). I could only find a handful of them, and
>they're randomly dotted all over the place: Latin Extended A, IPA
>Extensions, Letterlike Symbols, etc. But anyway, enough of my rant.)
>
>--
>Hasta la pasta,
>Jonathyn Bet'nct.
But aren't there a lot of letters (OSVWXZ) which are exactly the same in
small caps and lower case? If they're randomly dotted all over the place
anyway, there isn't even the benefit of having the whole set in one place.

John Vertical

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