Andrew (Ashton) and I had often wondered why type designers had not tackled the issue of designing a ligature for the world wide web initials. Why did such a ligature not appear in any PTF typefaces?

Jean François explained that from a technology point of view a world wide web ligature would interfere with hypertext links within electronic documents. Regarding printed documents he expressed a concern that a ligature had the potential to cause confusion for end users.

Jean François went on to explain that special characters in general have the potential to confuse end users.

He suggested that using ligatures in email addresses is potentially confusing. Regarding French email addresses it was interesting to learn that all accented characters have their accents removed because accented characters are not included in the ASCII character set.

The conversation about functionality and usability led to a navigation of the very peculiar layout of the Macintosh French keyboard. The pitfalls were absurdly fascinating with the most alarming oddity being the multiple keystroke required to access a period. Merde! Apparently a semicolon is more important to access than a period.