Apostrophes in non-ASCII names (was: A proposed solution for
descriptions)
Doug Ewell
dewell at adelphia.net
Tue Jun 27 21:52:37 CEST 2006
Ciarán Ó Duibhín <ciaran at oduibhin dot freeserve dot co dot uk> wrote:
> I will risk further sickening those who are tired of this topic by
> responding to recent posts which refer to one of mine. In doing so, I
> am not challenging the consensus which clearly exists on the list on
> the encoding of apostrophes, and which is embodied in Doug's latest
> proposals.
I'm under the impression there is no consensus, and I've gone ahead and
submitted the Amis proposal and left the others on the dock. When the
various factions are ready to find some common ground about apostrophes,
then we can start thinking about reintroducing proposals.
> Actually, U+2018 and U+2019 can be keyed directly, using free input
> method layouts. This is a safe way to do it, and works system-wide,
> under any application.
Most users, at least in the U.S. (and not the type who frequents a list
like this one or Unicode), have no IME and no idea how to type
directional quotes on a system-wide basis. Microsoft's
"US-International" keyboard has keys for them, but most people I know do
not use it.
> I am not arguing against typographical accuracy — why on earth would
> I? I am arguing against achieving typographical accuracy at the
> expense of encoding accuracy, which would be a kludge. We need to
> find ways of achieving both kinds of accuracy together.
But wait, there's more.
It is unfortunate but true that many people do not use fonts that
contain glyph mappings for U+02BB and U+02BC (they're not in most of
Microsoft's "core fonts" for Windows XP, Lucida Sans Unicode being an
exception) and have no way to type them into a search box. I still
believe it needs to be possible for these people to view and search for
N’Ko or Gwichʼin in the Registry. That means usability, which is an
important feature alongside accuracy, and it means ASCII fallbacks.
This is the place where we have no consensus.
--
Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California, USA
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
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