From: Ted Hopp (ted@newslate.com)
Date: Fri Jul 04 2003 - 16:58:16 EDT
I have just spent several hours reading through all of the postings of the
last few weeks related to the problems arising from the current combining
classes for Hebrew vowels. I appreciate how much thought so many people have
given to this issue.
I am an owner of a small software company that makes learning software. We
use Unicode throughout and have received compliments from our customers
about how user-friendly our Hebrew support is, particularly on entry of
nekudot.
The current Unicode vowels have been a problem for us. Because the combining
classes are wrong, our software ignores vowel combining classes. We wrote
custom software to handle multiple vowels on a letter. Frankly, I would
welcome the "disruption" of correcting the combining classes of existing
Hebrew vowels. It would allow us to retire code that we didn't want to write
in the first place and would rather not maintain. Can anyone point to,
describe, or even hypothesize a useful application for the current combining
class assignments for Hebrew vowels? Nevertheless, it seems that changing
combining classes is harder than changing the Ten Commandments (to keep with
the Biblical theme).
For what it's worth, among the other proposals I've read so far, the one to
use CGJ seems at the moment to be the one that, for us, would do the least
harm. However, we have not fully evaluated the impact of any of these on our
software.
From a business perspective, having to support two Hebrew vowel systems
would be anathema to us. The proposed change would have a direct, negative
impact on us and on our customers. On us, because our software is not
application-specific. We support both "modern Hebrew" and "Biblical Hebrew".
(The quotes are because we don't actually make such a distinction.) On our
customers, because they would have to learn and understand the subtle
differences between Hebrew vowels and Biblical Hebrew vowels. Our user
interface would have to change in ways that I don't even want to think
about. Functions like searching, sorting, and copy-and-paste from existing
Biblical text materials would become a nightmare, not to mention documents
that mix Biblical and modern text. (Here's a nice little scenario: copy a
word, paste it into a "find" dialog, and then watch it not find the same
word encoded with the other vowel system.) I can't imagine how we would
explain all this to our typical user.
If there were to be two Hebrew vowel systems in Unicode, I can tell you what
we would do: move everything to the vowel system that behaves correctly. (Of
course, we would then have to write migration software for all the existing
text users have in our system, and design it to be transparent to our users.
We would also have to think through how interaction with external
applications would work; that wouldn't be transparent to our users. A lot of
work, but much less than supporting two vowel systems internally.)
At the core, this seems to be driven by politics between Unicode, ISO, IETF,
and who knows who else. Speaking as someone with over 30 years experience in
the computer industry, including a decade or so serving on technical
standards committees at the U.S. and ISO levels, I can assert that seeking
technical solutions to political problems is generally very bad news. I
fully support trying to "do it right" by working through the political
process with these other organizations. The time it takes is time well
spent.
Ted Hopp
Ted Hopp, Ph.D.
ZigZag, Inc.
ted@newSLATE.com
+1-301-990-7453
newSLATE is your personal learning workspace
...on the web at http://www.newSLATE.com/
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