> For the same reason, why is the German "ess-tsett" (sharp S) given acompatibility decomposition as <s><s> instead of <long-s><s>?
Because in modern German orthography, the sharp-s is replaced by "ss" if the sharp-s is not available.
Michel de Montaigne displays a nice variety of esses in this letter to the King:
<http://bd8.com/temp/mm_lettre.jpg>
It looks as if he never wrote long s+s but he seems to be pretty flexible.
English practice was generally, I think, to write the long s first but _printed_ double s is always two tall longs, certainly in the 18th century:
<http://bd8.com/temp/georg1778.jpg>
I have some older Italian manuscripts including a letter from Petrarch but I can't find them at the moment. The Italian first s was tall and overhanging.
It's too late to tie these guys down to the rules of our illiterate world.
JD
