Pierpaolo Bernardi wrote:

> A secondary benefit of having a canonical decomposition for
> hanzi is that
> this decomposition could be used as a base for a radical+strokes based
> ordering.

This is possible only if the decomposition and the radical-stroke method
share the same logic, which is probably quite unlikely.

E.g., if you want an ordering based on the traditional Kangxi radicals, but
the decomposition is based on the writing order of the components, the
matching between the two systems becomes quite troublesome. The Kangxi
radical is often the first component, but not always: some radicals are
normally written after the phonetic, some are written partially before and
partially (the "sealing stroke") after it.

Moreover, the counting the number of strokes in a component (or in a hanzi)
may be quite arbitrary, because different fonts may lead to different
counts.

But if our hypothetically is visible to the user (i.e., corresponds closely
to keyboard units), people could get used to that way of decomposition, and
the encoding units themselves could become an excellent base for a new way
of ordering dictionaries.

_ Marco