Bug#99933: Default charset should be UTF-8

[Raul Miller <moth@debian.org>]

> > Let's imagine you're composing an html document.  What's to prevent
> > you from wrapping a mathematical alphanumeric character with <b></b>?

On Tue, Jun 12, 2001 at 10:41:14AM +0200, Radovan Garabik wrote:
> that is a different kind of "boldness", used to emphasise
> bold mathematical symbols are different symbols from those not bold.
> mathematical symbols enclosed in <b></b> are just emphasised normal
> mathematical symbols, not bold mathematical symbols

Now let's imagine that a person is actually using this document.

How can this person tell which kind of boldness is in use?

> > But if the context is not mathematical, how can you tell that
> > mathematical code points are used?

> I cannot, therefore there are special mathematical characters
> to distinguish it.

Let's imagine that a person is actually reading this document.  What
difference does it make to this person that the Unicode Consortium has
named the code point using the word MATHEMATICAL?  How would the
person even find out about this?  

[I guess they could do view source on the html document, then cut and
paste an individual character into some search dialog box which might
then be used to locate the character and (by association) the name of
the character.  But that seems a bit useless.]

> > If I say xy-2yz=0, and I don't use mathematical characters, why would
> > you not interpet that as indicating multiplication?
> 
> because I would interpret it as a comparision in some kind of
> programming language, the one that allows variables to begin
> with digit.

How would you know that the Unicode Consortium hadn't used the word
MATHEMATICAL to describe the code points of those characters?  If you
didn't know about the code points which have MATHEMATICAL in the name (for
example, last week), would you have had a different interpretation of this
expression?  If there was surrounding text describing the character of the
variables x, y, and z, would you insist on this contrived intepretation
of yours?

If we assume that the user is using debian software which merely displays
the characters (and doesn't actually inform the user of the unicode names
for the underlying code points), would there be any particular reason
for the user to interpret some characters as algebraic variables and
others as word forming characters in some unknown programming language
(for some reason other than knowledge of the unicode code point numbers)?

Thanks,

-- 
Raul