do you really think that OS vendors are going to rewrite *every* form
of input (not just keyboard drivers but copy-and-paste, files downloaded
from the net, etc) to do normalization? if they did, it would break
far more things than it would fix.
The idea is that non-normalized stuff will never exist in files, displays
to be copied/pasted, and the like simply because all such material
ultimately derives from something that was keyed in on a normalizing
keyboard.
it's a nice idea, but keyboard drivers and file formats are far removed
from anything over which we have significant influence. that, and
it's not sufficient - some text is generated by computer programs,
and we can't force those programmers to always generate normalized text
either.
the ironic thing is that Unicode isn't inherently normalized because
of a need for backward compatability with existing character sets -
you were supposed to be able to translate to and from Unicode without
loss. so people who are griping about the insistence on ASCII-
compatibility in email and insisting that we move to "pure" utf-8 are
really just saying we should trade one kind of backward compatibility
problem for another.
Keith