Thank you for the thorough and practical write-up.
About the only thing I would add to it is i18n concerns.
A few quick ones off of the top of my head:
- Words are separated by whitespace or dashes.
- Customers only ever enter ASCII.
- Customers only ever enter accented characters with/without accents.
- A "Unicode-capable" system will happily take in any valid unicode.
- A "Unicode-capable" system will pass through any valid unicode undisturbed.
- Software systems perform Unicode normalization.
- WinNT API is UTF-16.
- There is 1-to-1 mapping between uppercase and lowercase.
- Unicode collation algorithm is optimal for every single language.
- Unicode collation algorithm is optimal for multi-language document sets.
- Distinguishing/coalescing plural and singular forms of words is easy.
- There are separate plural/singular forms of words.
- Words have stem and optional suffixes, but not prefixes.
- Soundex etc. works for every language.
About the only thing I would add to it is i18n concerns.
A few quick ones off of the top of my head: