From: "Michael Everson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > I think it's stupid (in general) to argue for stripping a letter of > diacritics. If a reader is ignorant of their meaning, that can be > cured. But if they are meaningful, stripping them is just misspelling > the words they belong to. Why would anyone want to do that?
I think its inadvisable (in general) to call things stupid merely because one does not see the need. on the whole, that is a better time to ask the question than to make the judgment. There is actually a great deal of both European and American data in programs like Microsoft Exchange and Outlook, as well as in web search) that folding away diacritics as a part of giving full lists of possible matches is indeed preferred by users. Now they would (also) prefer the exact matches to have priority, but having additional matches without the diacritics is a common request, and one that has been built into many scenarios. Formalizing that operation in Unicode is only a bad thing (or a stupid thing, to use your words) if creating a standard that meets real world needs (as opposed to ideal typographic or linguistic preferences) is considered a bad (or stupid) thing. As far as I know, most of the members of the Unicode Consortium have those real world use cases as their first priority. MichKa [MS]
