On Sun, Jun 13, 2004 at 03:40:27AM +0200, Pedro Larroy wrote: > What advantages have to use characters not in standard keyboards? Isn't > it a little scary?
Well, what do you consider a 'standard' keyboard? The zip operator/Yen sign probably appears on most keyboards in Japan, but on very few in the US. My US keyboard gives me no convenient way to type a 'u with umlaut' character, but I'm sure that my friend Roland, who lives in Switzerland, has no such limitation. Like it or not, Unicode is the way of the future. Life really and truly will be easier once that becomes the default assumption; keyboard makers will start putting thought into how to provide easy access to normally-unused-in-this-locale characters, software will have to make it easy to work with foreign character sets, your terminal will not give you grief about displaying foreign characters, etc. But it's kind of a chicken-and-egg problem. If the characters are never used, we don't need to worry about them--except when we do. So, by making them more commonly used, we help bring about the day when we don't need to worry about them. And if you aren't ready to worry about them yet, I believe they all have ASCII equivalents (e.g., >>, <<, and zip). All the best, --Dks
