Mapping?

[Shawn Steele]

Disclaimer:  Not necessarily trying to advocate ß here, just explaining some of my thoughts.

> From: Lisa Dusseault [mailto:lisa.dusseault at gmail.com]
> Can we assume that Patrik wants ß interpreted as ß because he communicates mostly in Swedish with Swedish users and mostly reads Swedish Web pages?  

I'm not Patrik, but what I think is interesting is that ß is meaningless in Swedish.  For Swedish users, mapping ß to ss may not make sense because ss isn't ß.  Same in English, I can't make a fuß about something, I have to spell it fuss.  On the other hand, ß is meaningless, so I don't see that it hurts English or Swedish to map it to ss.  

Digressing:  ß is also very unique.  AFAIK it only has this one behavior because it was originally kinda like a ligature (some typography person's going to correct me :)  So unless ß has been adopted by another language I don't think there's a language where the mapping is actually wrong.  (ou == o is actually wrong many places, as is dropping diacritics or doing other diacritic mappings).  Eszett is unique.

On the third hand, ß is also the "correct" spelling for some words, so even though a Swiss user might expect something different, and I don't see any harm in mapping it, it is clear that fußball should be spelled fußball in Germany and Austria.  IMO that doesn't make it harmful that fußball and fussball end up at the same place.

-Shawn