Re: [EWMH] _NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE_AUXILIARY

[Tuomo Valkonen <tuomov iki fi>]

On 2007-10-19, Nicolas Mailhot <nicolas mailhot laposte net> wrote:
> Data exchange on the internet is more than HTML and besides at least
> 20% of the HTML pages I see everyday have broken encoding
> specification (The W3C spec states plainly encoding must not be
> assumed to be ISO-8859-1, change your browser fallback encoding to
> anything else and watch the breakage)

Email etc. also specify the encoding. It's been a while since I've
seen an email with broken encoding spec., since the newer MUAs tend
to do that instead of the user trying to figure it out. Likewise,
editors should tag files by the encoding they store them in, instead
of the user trying to provide that information.

> Spare me, I've already seen enough dead documents that relied on
> special fonts to be read. Math symbols need to be clearly specified
> like everything else.

I'm speaking of stuff like blackboard bold letters. They really demand
a blackboard bold font, but Unicode includes some of them as special
codepoints. Likewise a few superscript- and subscript symbols are 
absolutely mindless. Then there's stuff like double- and triple- 
integrals,which is really equal to including 'ff' ligatures and 
other such low-level typesetting stuff. There are even different 
sizes of operators. Far too detailed. And so on. Maths is written
in LaTeX.

>> Composition
>> is the more general approach, so I think it should've been chosen.)
>
> That would be fine if we started with a clean sheat, but then we'd all
> be writing esperanto or something like that.

What does the language or how people wrote the character matter? It's
just a _glyph_ outside any context that actually tells it's the document
is in some particular language. And in that case there's higher-level 
information to tell how to interpret the glyphs. Having many codepoints
that produce the same glyph creates a lot of confusion and troubles in
contexts where such information is not available.

> That's your beef, not what Chinese complain about

>From what I've read, that's exactly what they complain about.

> You can complain of monoculture but there is zero alternative to the
> Unicode.org consortium today and people who've looked at the problem
> seriously are more than happy to let it handle the mess human scripts
> are.

Yepyep, people once again want a global regime that tells other people
how they should do things; a monoculture to be fed down everyone's 
throats, with no possibility for alternatives. That's the trend in
everything.

-- 
Tuomo