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.
OK, so we could have it that for the vowel sound the sequence holam-vav is the preferred encoding, but vav-holam is a less preferred alternative. That would be analogous to preferring ß in German or accented upper case in French, but accepting ss or unaccented capitals as a less preferred alternative which may be encountered in some texts. But would that meet SII's criteria? If not, it would be like a refusal to allow ß or accented upper case in Unicode because users had got used to not having them available on older computers.
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.
Probably not. Do they have any option to set a flag like "the last character was a vowel" which can then be tested when the next character is painted? If so there is a chance of detecting this efficiently without having to be too clever.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://web.onetel.net.uk/~peterkirk/
