Re: [9fans] Woes of New Language Support

[erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>]

> to be fair to the unicode people, this decoupling of glyphs and codepoints
> is (i think) the most straightforward way to implement some languages like
> arabic, where the glyphs for characters depend on their position within a
> word.  that is, a letter at the beginning of a word looks different from
> what it would look like if it was in the middle.

my opinion (not that i'm entitled to one here) is
that the unicode guys screwed up.  unicode is not
consistant.  explain why there are two code points sigma.
03c3	greek small letter sigma
03c2	greek small letter final sigma
why does german get ä, ö, ü?  if you want to take
this further, why are there capital forms of latin letters?
can't that also be inferred by the font?

what's called a ligature in one language is a character
in another.  i see no consistency.  it seems like the
unicode committee had a problem with too much
knowledge of the specific problems and few actual
unifying (sorry) concepts.

i think it would make much more sense to put this logic
in editors.  this would also allow the freedom to use a
capital, ligature, final form in the wrong place.
like say studlyCaps.  i can't imagine english is the only
language in the world that gets abused.

- erik