> or just as a ligature in rendering phase and stored as 'ss'.
Probably.
> to save significant amount of collective effort
I've seen this kind of suggestion a number of times on HN, and I find it highly amusing. When confronted with a difficult challenge in representing the world on a computer, apparently the answer is to instead change the world.
OK, but then how are you going to handle hundreds of years of legacy texts?
In German, 'ß' is definitely not just a ligature of 'ss'.
Consider 'Masse' (mass) vs. 'Maße' (dimensions).
Uppercasing these words will necessarily produce ambiguity.
It would be equally tempting -- and wrong -- to treat the German characters 'ä', 'ö' and 'ü' as ligatures of 'ae', 'oe' and 'ue'. They're pronounced the same, and the latter forms commonly occur as substitutions in informal writing, but they also occur in proper names, where it would be incorrect to substitute them with the former. However, if you want to sort German strings, 'ä', 'ö' and 'ü' sort as 'ae', 'oe' and 'ue'.
Probably.
> to save significant amount of collective effort
I've seen this kind of suggestion a number of times on HN, and I find it highly amusing. When confronted with a difficult challenge in representing the world on a computer, apparently the answer is to instead change the world.
OK, but then how are you going to handle hundreds of years of legacy texts?