Re: [idn] Dots, and a path to working IDNs

["Adam M. Costello" <amc@cs.berkeley.edu>]

liana.ydisg@juno.com wrote:

> Allow me to comment on your UTF-8 as a long term solution.

If I understand correctly, you are proposing an alternative model for
representing characters.  Currently, characters are represented as
indices into a table.  If a character is not in the table, it cannot be
represented.

You are proposing that instead of a table of characters, we have a
table of character-building-blocks, and to represent characters as
instructions for how to compose them from the building blocks.  This
would allow new/obscure characters to be used without deploying new
fonts everywhere.

(You also propose to represent the building blocks phonetically using
ASCII, but I think that's an orthogonal issue.)

Is my understanding roughly correct?

It's an interesting idea, but dramatically different from the current
text model.  I suspect that you'd have to change lots of things in all
applications and all operating systems to make this work.

Regarding the use of English keyboards, I'm not sure what your point is.
The representation of text in a file or on a wire is unrelated to how
users type that text, right?

AMC