Without a standard, you can't possibly make everyone happy. -- Nathaniel
Yes, and that's the problem of the unregulated combinations of
combining characters of ISO10646/UNICODE.
People who are satisfied with Latin-1 or other precombined
characters may not be able to notice the problem, though.
This is utterly ridiculous.
Yes. ISO10646/UNICODE is utterly ridiculous in several ways including
your point. I've heard that even the infamous ISO is modifying it to
bound the allowable repertoiries of combining characters.
My mail tool. understands Latin-1.
However, it still represents 'backspaceA as '^HA, because the underlying
tools are designed to permit the viewing of arbitarry (possibly binary)
files, not pseudo-composed characters.
I hope your mail tool is intelligent enough to recognize escape sequences
for ISO 8859/* and other character sets. Good luuck.
In other words, my system can show me the Swedish characters perfectly,
but only if they are labelled as such. It does NOT just assume that
every use of backspace is part of some weird combined character, because
there's no way to do that and be consistent with other reasonable uses
of the system.
Agreed. I'm totally against the use of backspace to composite
character.
But, don't forget that, though major European languages are
covered by precombined characters of ISO10646/UNICODE, a lot of
otheer glyphs are not, some of which may be represented with
combining characters of ISO 2022 or ISO10646/UNICODE, which
makes ISO10646/UNICODE just as complex as ISO 2022. Compared
to the involved complexitty off ISO10646/UNICODE, parsing of
desgnation escape seqences of ISO 2022 is nothing.
Masataka Ohta