From: "Peter Kirk" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > If a rendering engine doesn't do what it should, it is not for keyboards > to fix the problem. The point of Unicode is not for typing what one > displays oneself but to interchange information between different > systems. So in general the typing and the rendering are done on > different systems.
I'm not speaking about the way to render Unicode, but to the way a keyboard can be built to respect the encoding constraints of another standard. Think about the Latin script for example, not all combinations of dead keys plus base letters are implemented in keyboard, just because they are generating a combined character which has no correspondance with a default ISO-8859 character set. Of course you can extend your keyboard to support more characters, but then, you expose applications with input sequences that cannot be mapped in a text they are creating within a restricted character set. As far as I know, an application has little control on the subset of character it can accept from an IME, or keyboard driver, and if some characters in the generated combining sequence are ignored, and some other are accepted, it creates a new sequence which may not be appropriate in the target subset. So clearly this is not a Unicode issue, but an issue with the usability of keyboards and IMEs with all applications that are assuming the complete support of the keyboard subset in the text they accept (if you don't know what I mean, just look at the remaining number of games that are just interpreting keycodes or that are assuming a US keyboard layout, and that are hard or impossible to use with their default keyboard control assignments, as they are mapping for example Alt+digit keystrokes, when some keyboards will not be able to generate these keystrokes without an additional shift key modifier, and you'll get a good example about the usability of a enhanced keyboard in a context where it was assumed that all keyboard sequences were possible). You've got similar issues with some APIs that use "keyboard accelerators" or mnemonics to call menu options. Here again Unicode is not the issue, but this is another example of where adding support for additional characters on keyboards is not that simple: there's a compromize to find with its usability within softwares which were not localized to support them.
