Message-Id: <6.2.1.2.2.20050510150539.056f5e60@mail.jefsey.com>
Date: Tue, 10 May 2005 15:31:15 +0200
To: "Donald Z. Osborn" <dzo@bisharat.net>,
	Hans Aberg <haberg@math.su.se>
From: "JFC (Jefsey) Morfin" <jefsey@jefsey.com>
Subject: Re: Full Unicode Computer Keyboard
Cc: Unicode List <unicode@unicode.org>
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At 07:09 10/05/2005, Donald Z. Osborn wrote:
>Since it is possible to have more than one keyboard layout installed on a
>system, and for users to switch among them as necessary, perhaps one approach
>to what it sounds like you are interested in (pardon if I'm off) would be a
>suite of layouts, designed with some of the above concerns in mind and which
>together would cover the unicode range. This might be conceived together with
>regional keyboards such as for Africa, or separately. In any event, in an 
>ideal
>world, we would have LED keyboards that can tell us what the key values are in
>the layout we've selected, and a suite of layouts that can cover the range of
>unicode characters.

Dear all interested in keyboards,
Internet uses "charsets" to define two information together (RFC 2277, by 
Harald Alvestrand).
- the encoding scheme. By default UTF-8.
- the rules to build a list of characters. No rule meaning the whole ISO 
10646 list.

Right now the IETF WG-ltru 
(http://ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html) discusses the extension 
of the RFC 3066 langtags to introduce the "script" information from RFC 
15924. I question this on several grounds:

1. RFC 2301 considered it and opposed to a confusion between content 
(language) and layout (charset)
2. ISO 15924 comes from the UNICODE script.txt with some more 
specialisations. They actually name the ISO 10646 partitions associated to 
languages.
3. I consider there are much more charsets in use or needed than ISO 15924.

     - the first one being the keyboards. With real problems since my AZERT 
keyboard does not support all the legal French characters, so I must rely 
on the goodwill of applications to enter characters sequences correctly, 
what is totally impossible (how do you want a program to know that COEUR 
has a ligature and NOE has not).

     - but there are many others, like Internationalized Domain Name 
(nicknamed "two keyboards names" because people need to enter ".com" in 
ASCII), or other observed in the keyboards and displays variety (for 
example upper cases only) or protocols (lower cases only).

I am therefore interested in every lists such as script.txt documenting 
different (primarily UTF-8) charsets. I have a cross-language system to 
specify for a worldwide multilingual directory for the future MGN 
(multilingual global network). I need to display the local information with 
a charset corresponding to the callers display/keyboard/printers through 
different communications technologies, including postal services (sending a 
letter).

I am quite interested in the LED keyboards and displays. We have a serious 
problem with homographs and their use for phishing purposes. It would be 
very interesting to display the charset of a document and to force the 
charset of the terminal. This would lead homographs to show-up instead of 
fooling the user. We could agree that "Ctrl-Windows" would switch from 
Documents charset to Terminal chosen default charset.

I thank you for your help.
jfc