On 10/08/2003 18:44, Doug Ewell wrote:
Has it occurred to anyone yet that the very *concept* of spacing
diacritics is a hack? Spacing diacritics are used to conduct a sort of
meta-discussion about characters, as in "A base character o is combined
with an acute accent ´ to create ó." They are not part of the normal
writing systems of most natural languages.
It is as if I were describing the two typical glyphs used for lower-case
g, the one with "one bowl" and the one with "two bowls," but actually
showing the separate, constituent pieces of the glyphs instead of using
words to describe them. They are interesting things to talk about, but
not necessarily things that need to be encoded in plain text.
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
They are indeed interesting things to talk about, and many people do
talk about them, and they appear in many texts (including the Unicode
Standard!). The goal of Unicode is to define characters which people
use, and that must include documents about languages e.g. dictionaries,
tutorials, discussions of writing systems etc - which, put together,
form a significant proportion of publishing output. They are indeed
meta-content but that does not disqualify them from being plain text.
Spacing diacritics clearly come into the category of characters which
people use, and so should be defined, and properly and unambiguously
so, by the standard.
--
Peter Kirk
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (work)
http://www.qaya.org/
