Thierry,

> I only say that:

> 1) Forcing, as this was written in the XeTeX FAQ, user to enter the
special codepoint for the fi ligature since, white eyes, scornful wave
of the hand: "this is the way this is done with Unicode" is sheer
stupidity. 

I don't know who told you that...  just because there is a codepoint for something does not mean that one has to access that codepoint directly in all cases. Software at various levels can render a ligature on the basis of various actual character sequences (e.g. f + i, or f, i when ligatures are forced, etc. 

It's simply a level of what support one wishes to offer.... 

KF