Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?

From: D. Starner (shalesller@writeme.com)
Date: Mon May 24 2004 - 13:31:14 CDT

  • Next message: Michael Everson: "Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?"

    jameskass@att.net (James Kass) writes:

    > Guessing's not their job. It's up to a sophisticated search
    > engine to find what users seek. Some of us have tried to
    > dispel some of these fears by pointing out possible solutions.

    The exact same search engine can search among Fraktur and
    Roman scripts, too. Unicode shouldn't add to the complexity
    of systems, except where necessary.

    > the idea that "complex scripts"
    > couldn't even be *displayed* didn't stop them from being
    > encoded as complex scripts in the standard.

    That's because that's what they were, and that's how they
    needed to be encoded for proper handling.

    > Can a Sanskrit scholar find Sanskrit text on-line if the search
    > string uses Devanagari characters and the on-line text is in
    > a different script?

    Probably not; and I don't see that feature being added in the
    near future. You couldn't help the Sanskrit scholar without
    hurting more important groups, but the Phoenician scholar is
    the most important group using Phoenician.

    > > Because plain-text distinction
    > > of script variant text in the same language is just
    > > about the least important thing in their work?
    >
    > Because they've never had the ability to do this in the past?

    But they have. They could have printed in a Phoenician font,
    but they chose modern Hebrew fonts, just like the middle English scholar
    uses modern English fonts.

    > Because it's there? If Sir Edmund Hillary (hope the name's spelled
    > right) had awaited some kind of an epiphany revealing a better
    > reason, would he have ever made it to the top?

    Klingon is there too. So is Ewellic. Neither would cause any problem with
    the standard, or have anything debatable about structure or encoding.
    If we're going to start encoding stuff because it's there, maybe we should
    start with stuff that doesn't get in other people's way?

    -- 
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