Re: [tlug] Unicode

[simon colston <simon@example.com>]

On Sat, 12 Jul 2003 21:46:37 +1000 (EST)
Jim Breen <jwb@example.com> wrote:

> 
> Are you
> saying because 手紙 means letter in Japanese and toilet paper in
> Chinese they must be written with different codes? If so, "vent" in
> English and "vent" in French had better be too, because they don't mean
> the same thing.
> 

But there may be benefits in having separate code points that don't
overlap.  If you type 'vent' into a search engine you are not searching
for "four characters that look like 'vent'", you are searching for "text
that contains the word that has the meaning 'vent'".  Any results that
have a different meaning are useless for that search.  The search engine
could use any available markup information, I suppose, but markup should
not really be used to give meaning to a document, rather just information
on how the document should be displayed.

-- 
simon colston
simon@example.com