From: jameskass@att.net
Date: Sun May 02 2004 - 07:27:39 CDT
D. Starner wrote,
>
> And there are sites that consider Gaelic and Fraktur seperate scripts,
> including one by Michael Everson. Even if we assume knowledge and competence,
> we still can't assume they're using the same definition for a seperate script
> as Unicode does.
I agree with the second statement above, but would like to see the
link to the Everson page(s) mentioned. Sure, there are people who
consider Roman and Italic to be separate scripts, too. When someone
requests evidence of how users treat something, we just try to
find that evidence and factor it in accordingly.
>
> > Imagine going back in time ten years or so and approaching the
> > user community with the concept of a double-byte character
> > encoding system which could be used to store and transfer
> > electronic data in a standard fashion. If they'd responded to
> > this notion by indicating that their needs were already being
> > well-served by web-Hebrew, would the Unicode project have
> > been scrapped?
>
> Yes. How many millions of dollars have gone into defining and implementing
> Unicode? Do you honestly think that Microsoft and IBM and Apple would
> have spent all the money they have if their users were well-served by
> what you call web-Hebrew?
>
I don't think that the users were well-served by what is called
web Hebrew and never said I did. Web Hebrew is a "standard"
which involves what we now call the "masquerading" of Hebrew
characters as upper-ASCII.
"Web Hebrew AD" and "Web Hebrew Monospace" are the names
of TrueType fonts. Other fonts use the same masquerade, thus
it was an ad-hoc "standard".
http://www.brijnet.org/ivrit/webheb.htm
http://www.stanford.edu/~nadav/hebrew.html
http://www.jewfaq.org/alephbet.htm
... and many other pages give info about Web Hebrew.
Quoting from the "jewfaq" page,
"The example of pointed text above uses Snuit's Web Hebrew AD font.
These Hebrew fonts map to ASCII 224-250, high ASCII characters
which are not normally available on the keyboard, but this is the
mapping that most Hebrew websites use. I'm not sure how you use
those characters on a Mac. In Windows, you can go to ..."
> So now if you think that two scripts that are isomorphic and closely related
> should be unified, then you're exerting "political pressure"?
Since no rational basis for the heated objections to the proposal
seems apparent, "political pressure" appears to be a likely choice.
Best regards,
James Kass
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