the reason that Unicode has multiple representations for characters in
the first place - because they wanted to support invertable
translation to and from legacy character sets without information loss
Nonsense. One can't convert UTF-8 to ISO 8859-1, for example, without
information loss.
I suppose I should have been more precise, but I thought it would be
obvious. the criteria was to be able to translate from a legacy charset
to Unicode and back to the original charset without lossage.
If you're trying to point to some actual feature of Unicode, give a
complete quote and a precise reference---and then explain how this
justifies your claims about unnormalized text entering the system.
I've got the Unicode standard on the shelf here, but frankly Dan,
you're not worth the trouble of my opening the book. you can find it
yourself if you're that interested.
if you want to try to convince everybody that it's impossible for
non-normalized Unicode to leak into email, or that everyone (not just
email) should generate Unicode in the way that you think is best,
and that everyone else is likely to follow your advice (because your
strategy depends on precisely that) feel free. since you won't get
anything close to consensus anyway, there's not much point in my
discussing this with you further.
Keith