Am 20.10.2010 10:44, schrieb Philip Taylor (Webmaster, Ret'd):
[1] IMVVVHO, a successor to Unicode should have one plane per written language (and perhaps even per dialect thereof), so that a document written using this encoding will automatically carry the appropriate language semantics without requiring explicit tagging. A font implementing such a system need be very little larger than existing Unicode fonts, since glyphs could be recycled across languages where appropriate, but the underlying encoding should keep the languages entirely separate.
That's difficult, because languages and scripture are evolving. Is there a difference between Montenegrin and Serbian? Will there be a difference for German German and Swiss German (the standardardizations of both languages are nearly identical, but there is an important typographical difference: ß)
The cedilla/comma below shows the real problem: There is no fixed way of writing a letter/sign/glyph (else there wouldn't be different fonts) but the unicode model glyph=f(meaning)=F(codepoint) doesn't work that way all the times. The relation glyph <-> meaning is more difficult and depends on the people.
So setting up different planes for different languages might be helpful, but its positive impact won't be so great, I think. But who knows all the problems arising from that?
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