Unicode & IETF

[Shawn Steele]

>  One of my problems with all of this has been that I identified a problem but haven't been very good at explaining it, especially in a way that is clear to everyone on this list and the amount of apparently-unshared terminology and conceptual understanding.

I confess that it's still unclear to me what the problem is.

> In that case, we might have a problem in principle but, in practice, there would only be one coding of the character in use and it would be canonical for that reason.  

Unicode geeks equate "character" more with the linguistic use than with the glyph (http://www.unicode.org/glossary/#character).  I think you mean something more like "glyph" in that statement, but I'm not sure.  We've been told by experts that these are different characters though they have similar glyphs.  So a similar statement to the above could be "in that case, we might have a problem in principle, but, in practice, there would be only one coding of each of the characters in use, and they would be canonical for that reason, despite appearing to share the same glyph."

But, as said up top, I confess that it's still unclear to me what the problem is.  I hear "they look the same", but when it's suggested to treat them as homographs I hear "no, they're not homographs, they're something worse."

-Shawn