On Sunday, August 10, 2003 12:32 AM, John Cowan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Peter Kirk scripsit: > > > This is a clear demonstration that Microsoft also has problems with > > the mechanism which has been defined in the standard for ten years, > > This is a clear demonstration that Uniscribe fails to implement a > standard correctly, a property unique neither to Microsoft nor to the > Unicode Standard. Except that in that case, we are no speaking about something that has already been standardized, but only used as a legacy mean to achieve some results with mosre or less success. Whateer you think, the SPACE+diacritic is still a hack, and certainly not a canonical equivalent (including for its properties), of the existing spacing diacritics, which also do not fit all usages because they are symbols. The fact that there are compatibility decompositions of these spacing diacritics is just to match those legacy uses, but it is not a solution. It just ressembles the way many keyboard drivers allow users to enter those spacing diacritics, but input methods and keyboard drivers are nothing as a proof face to Unicode, as the keyboard driver will still only return a "combined" spacing diacritic, but not the sequence SPACE+diacritics (whose real usage in text seems to occur only in old texts where non-spacing combining diacritics where not encodable or renderable, or just to allow speaking in full text about the individual diacritics themselves, a more rare case). May be I'm wrong for this assertion, but this is my feeling and experience about these characters, which were merely symbols or hacks to represent non English text with a restricted ASCII alphabet as an approximate representation (the inclusion of other spacing diacritics in the high range of an 8-bit ISO-8859-1 encoding was very strange for me, as if they were there only to allow approximating other missing precombined characters which could not fit in the table, but produced poor results so that most texts were never encoded with this charset but with other more appropriate charsets when needed. * * [OT] This was a shame when ISO adapted the DEC VT charset to create ISO-8859-1, but forgot important characters needed for the languages that this charset was supposed to cover (like the French oe and OE ligatures, and a few characters missing for Baltic languages, Icelandic, and Catalan.) ISO-8859-15 is certainly better now than ISO-8859-1 for the same languages and for even more than initially defined, and in practice that's Microsoft that filled the gap with Windows1252 when dropping the unnecessary C1 controls (forgetting the legacy roundtrip compatibility of controls with the dying EBCDIC).
