Erik, please have the curtesy to read my posting as carefully as I framed it, I
am NOT waving either flag or sharpened axe, and I think that there is a very
real baby in with this now somewhat bloody bath-water.
I quote my self, adding the intended stress:
the european viewer is *accustomed* to seeing all of the
variations [of Roman charsets], and *habitually* perceives them as similar.
your response:
The unified Han glyphs *are* similar. I challenge you
to come up with a Unicode Han character that has
dissimilar glyphs when rendered in the traditional CJK
printing styles.
ignores my main point, I dont deny the similarities, I am stressing the possible
effects of the differences, and basically I am postulating that it is
*possible* that the message gets garbled. Outside of etymologists, few
orientals posses an encyclodepiac view of all possible HAN, and, I suspect, are
not *accustomed* to reading foreign variants.
Given the vehemance shown by Ohta-san, and my personal difficulty with
less-familiar variants of the VERY MUCH SMALLER Roman character set (eg, english
court hand, fractur) I think this issue deserves some research, not the flaming
I have seen here, especially considering the fact that most of us have not taken
the trouble to research even to the extent of doing a survey for extant research
efforts.
Please also consider how the user is expected to interact with a UA which
employs a folded set af HAN characters. If the program correctly intuits the
font for each, then no problem. But if the presentation to the user is not so
well behaved, then the user would be having to muck-about at a low level, and
this could become extremely tiresome. I expect better of my automata than that,
and I suspect you do as well.
I am not normally a violent person (inspite of my 2 meter height and 21 stone
weight), but it is precisly when my tools misbehave that I am most tempted. It
is from this perspective that I sympathise with Ohta-san.
--
dana s emery <de19(_at_)umail(_dot_)umd(_dot_)edu>