In a message dated 2002-02-09 13:00:59 Pacific Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
> It seems to me that this problem really needs some other fix than the > merging of all similar-looking characters in all character sets. I > just can't see that working. Even the "merging" part wouldn't work. Let's say that I, like Ken Sakamura or Bernard Miller before me, have decided that I know much more about character encoding than the Unicode Consortium or WG2, and I am going to develop my own character encoding that will solve the problem of confusables once and for all. OK, we start with the easy ones. Latin A, Greek Alpha, and Cyrillic A all get unified. Latin E, Greek Epsilon, Cyrillic E, unified. Hey, this is easier than I thought. Latin B, Greek Beta, Cyrillic Ve. Ha! I'm smart enough to know that Ve gets unified with B and Beta, even though it represents a different sound. Just like Han unification! Boy, those Unicode dolts really missed something there. Let's keep going. Latin Y, Greek Upsilon, Cyrillic U. Wait a minute, that Cyrillic U doesn't look *quite* the same. Oh well, it's close enough, right? Let's try some lower-case letters. Latin a, Greek alpha, Cyrillic a. That Greek alpha looks kinda cursive, doesn't it? Should we unify it or not. Hmmm... How about Latin n and Greek eta? Is that descender on the eta significant or not? Hey, you could stick an eta in the middle of a Web address and really fool somebody. Better unify. How about Latin v and Greek nu? Different glyphs or not? In 9-point MS Sans Serif, they're pretty close, aren't they? (And don't forget Armenian vo!) Same goes for Latin y and Greek gamma. Well, you get the point. The world of alphabetic confusables is just not that simple or that 1-to-1. There are more edge cases, in fact, than obvious cases such as the a/alpha or o/omicron that we keep hearing about. And if I were trying to design this hypothetical "Uniglyph" encoding to get rid of those pesky confusables, and still provide support for alphabetic scripts besides Latin, I would eventually have to face the fact that it *can't be done*. Oh, sure, it can be done for a/alpha and o/omicron, so I can make a sales presentation or a picket sign. But a complete technical solution, uh, no. -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California (address will soon change to dewell at adelphia dot net)