So, let me clarify. You are proposing that the order vav-holam be used for the consonant vowel sequence, and that both vav-holam and holam-vav be considered valid encodings for the vowel only version? OK I suppose if we can somehow ensure that these are treated identically for collation, searching etc (though we cannot of course make them canonically equivalent).
I'm not proposing anything. I'm reporting what works and what does not work from a *rendering* perspective so that this can be taken into account as necessary. There are a number of different aspects to text processing, and there is often a tendency on the Unicode list to ignore those that don't relate directly to encoding or to speak of them only in very generalised terms ('you can do that with markup'). This was probably fine back when Unicode was not widely implemented, but now the standard is out there in the world interracting with all the other aspects of text processing as implemented by different systems and applications. I think it is a good idea to clarify, whenever possible, what the impact of potential solutions are on existing implementations.
In this case, there are two encoding preferences with related display preferences. One preference preserves and displays a distinction, and one preference removes and hides a distinction. I prefer the former, and various contributors have explained why it is a good idea to preserve the distinction. Jony doesn't seem to be interested in the distinction. Fonts can cater to both, so it seems to me that the main impact is in comparing texts that preserve the distinction with those that don't.
An even more clever font would then have the option of detecting which vav-holam sequences are actually the vowel and displaying accordingly, thus meeting the objection that the visual display should depend on the font etc rather than on the choice of otherwise equivalent encodings.
Fonts don't get that clever.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC [EMAIL PROTECTED]
The sight of James Cox from the BBC's World at One,
interviewing Robin Oakley, CNN's man in Europe,
surrounded by a scrum of furiously scribbling print
journalists will stand for some time as the apogee of
media cannibalism.
- Emma Brockes, at the EU summit
