Uppercase ß

[Werner LEMBERG via Unicode]

> The ALL-CAPS "SS" really has little to recommend it, intrinsically.
> It is de-facto a fall-back; one that competed with "SZ" as used in
> telegrams (while they still were a thing).

Well, the status of `ß' is indeed complicated, and the radical
solution used in Switzerland has certainly benefits.

> Not being able to know how to hyphenate MASSE without knowing the
> meaning of the word is also not something that I consider a
> "benefit".

I don't see much difference to the English example of `re-cord'
vs. `rec-ord'.  And Swiss people won't start to use `ẞ' just for
getting the right meaning...

> Uppercase forms for `ß' have been kicking around in fonts for a long
> time as was documented around the time that the character was
> encoded.

Yes, and it was never successful.  The introduction of `ẞ' into
Unicode a few years ago was mainly driven by experts, not something
that had big popularity before.

> With changing environment (starting with influence from Anglo-Saxon
> use of type and not ending with the way the character is treated in
> relation to phonetics) I've been expecting to see usage evolving;
> and not necessarily driven by software engineers.

Yes, let's see how everything will evolve.  Regardless of that,
software should support the status quo as good as possible.


    Werner