> 1) it destabilizes the default tailorable template of ISO/IEC 14651 > and the UCA which has been published for some time. Anyone who *has* > tailored it would have to do all that work all over again.
You are certainly right that this is not a slam-dunk;
This noun must have been on TV a lot in the US recently; I have seen it a lot but it remains obscure, apart from being a basketball reference. What does it mean? That I am right that the proposal is not a shoo-in? Or, indeed, that I am right that it is not a foregone conclusion that the proposal will be accepted?
there are reasons for and against it. And it may well be that the committee decides against it.
There are two templates, which are synchronized, and decided about by two committees.
What we actually did was to put similar letters near other letters, *and if their decompositions were the same* we interfiled them.
I remember. I was on the committee that helped to decide these things.
There is, however, little principled difference between Å, ¸ , ¼ , Ñ, Ø, ?, and Ô that would cause a user to think that the some should be interfiled and some should not. In some languages these would be seen as "separate letters" (e.g. with different primary weights) and in others not; but that does not line up in any particular way with what is in the UCA. (see also comment below).
Those aren't the ones I'm worried about, and they are not much of a problem. We had principles for determining "basic letters" and those are what we used; what I see now is a proposal to change that.
See http://www.unicode.org/charts/collation/chart_Latin.html for many other cases.
Please do. Do you really want all those letters between "e" and "f" interfiled with "e"? I surely do not.
> 3) in discussions elsewhere, Mark has talked about what "most users""expect" and I found his suggestion to be anglocentric and unsubstantiated.
And I will refrain from saying what I think of your reasoning ability in general, although circularity seems to be a particular specialty.
Sweet of you to say.
I suggest that we stick to the facts instead of ad hominem attacks.
Calling a thing "ad hominem" doesn't make it ad hominem. It is your suggestion which I criticized, because it seems very A-to-Z and alien to the principles which have been in the template until now.
For user expectations, check out how foreign words with unusual accents are sorted in a variety of languages. I have seen no reason to believe that Germans or French or others behave much differently when faced with a letter like ø that is not one that they use. The key is whether they would expect to see:
a) Interleaved: ..oa.. ..øb.. ..oz..
You can tailor for this now.
b) Separate but near: ..oz.. ..øb.. ..pa..
This is what we have now.
c) Like a particular language (Danish) ..yb.. ..øb..
You can tailor for this now.
My point is made here. It is really only in initial position where this is likely to be noticed. What I want is the status quo, however. Leave the template and its principles alone.
a) Interleaved: ..oa.. ..öb.. ..oz..
This is what we have now.
b) Separate but near: ..oz.. ..öb.. ..pa..
You can tailor for this now.
c) Like a particular language (Swedish or Phonebook German) ..yb.. ..öb..
..od.. ..öz.. ..of..
You can tailor for this now.
More accurately, you believe that the correct behavior occurs.
It is correct for most of the letters which would be affected by the change you propose. The overwhelming majority of the letters-without-diacritics which occur between the "main A-Z letters" are correctly filed that way, and would be incorrectly filed if interfiled with the "main" letters. Is there a discomfort in what happens between Ø/Ö? Well, that's an anomaly, right enough but it is well-known and can easily be tailored for anyone worried about it. Lumping all the Engs with N or all the Schwas with E, however, would have only the effect of making a working template cease to work for the people who really need those letters: linguists, speakers of African languages, and so on. The only people who use the sideways "o" and the top- and bottom-half "o" are Uralic linguists, and the template works correctly for them, at least for those letters.
> 5) if Mark wants to make a tailoring to interfile all these letters(which can only result in what I describe as "visual seasickess" to any poor users who have to actually read such wordlists.
Again, no evidence.
It was argued years ago in TC304 and WG20. I'm disheartened to have to reopen the arguments now, particularly as it affects stability and you yourself have been a champion for stability.
Let's look at a particular example, letters based on "O". UCA *already* interleaves the list below (UCA O List). Adding John's list to that would add only the two elements:
John's list?
> 6) the Latin alphabet has a lot more than 26 letters in it. In thisage of the Universal Character Set, "most users" would do better to get used to this than to be hobbled by older concepts.
I agree with the general principle, but it has no bearing on the topic at hand.
It is the key to the principles which are in the template now. -- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
