> >I don't see where the problem lies. Yes, U+00C5 and U+212B do look >identical; the existence of pairs like this is the main reason why >canonical equivalence tables exist.
They look identical because it is the same character. As Dough said they exist because a legacy encoding. Personally I think Unicode should never have allowed them to have more than one code point. While there is not doubt about the above, I am not sure that the nameprep specification that 00DF (small letter sharp s) should be matted to "ss". I am not sure how Germans handle this character. Do they always replace double s with it? Or only on some special words? If they do not generally do this, the mapping should not be done. It is somewhat like the fact that the Greek version of latin A is not mapped to the Roman version of latin A. Even though their origin is the same latin A and look alike. While "small letter sharp s" looks like "small letter beta", there are no similarities between double s and "small letter sharp s". So why not let "small letter sharp s" remain that and be a distinctive character in a domain name. I assume Germans use it to write German words. Not to replace double s in non-German names. Dan
