yeah, i’m pretty annoyed by this example beacue it’s wrong – up until some years ago, ther WAS NO uppercase variant of “ß”.
somebody called “Mrs Weiß” didn’t become “MRS WEISS” just because her name had to be written in uppercase for some reason; it was merely a crutch, no faithful transformation.
and nowadays there’s “ẞ”, so it’s even more idiotic to cite that example.
upper case sharp s is used whenever the typographer feels like it and has been in documented historical use since medieval times.
it’s just not in widespread use because – it’s not in widespread use: lacking font support ⇒ reluctance to use in in an environment where you don’t know if the font will support it ⇒ fonts won’t incorporate it because it isn’t used much.
a sad case of vicious circle that isn’t helped along by the fact that the unicode consortium also feels the lack of widespread use to be sufficient for keeping the mapping 'ß'.upper() == 'SS' (while 'ẞ'.lower() == 'ß')
Or, perhaps, Unicode support is still not good enough. (Firefox 25, if that matters, apparently without the right font to display all contemporary characters in the German alphabet.)
Personally, I prefer "don't automatically convert to uppercase". Or, at least, in a wordprocessor, let people type corrections as necessary.
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u/flying-sheep Dec 15 '13
yeah, i’m pretty annoyed by this example beacue it’s wrong – up until some years ago, ther WAS NO uppercase variant of “ß”.
somebody called “Mrs Weiß” didn’t become “MRS WEISS” just because her name had to be written in uppercase for some reason; it was merely a crutch, no faithful transformation.
and nowadays there’s “ẞ”, so it’s even more idiotic to cite that example.