From: Peter Constable (petercon@microsoft.com)
Date: Thu May 27 2004 - 18:07:23 CDT
> From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org]
On Behalf
> Of D. Starner
> Scholars often need to seperate text by the particular
> script the text was written in, often down to the
> very scribe. That's done by storing it some sort
> of tagged format, and having your search system
> let you select based on the script--trivial in most
> database systems. Phoencian and Hebrew are just a bit
> broader than most distinctions.
So, saying that, while people have asked for plain-text distinction of
their text, they can accomplish what they need using markup, and it's
not unreasonable to ask them to do so.
Noted.
That seems to me to be a greater level of inconvenience for the
anti-unification paleographers as the pro-unification paleographers
would face with distinct encodings (needing to fold character
distinctions), and probably for implementers wanting to support both as
well as for general users. But that's an initial reaction that would
need to be backed up by more discerning analysis than "seems to me"
provides.
Usage scenario (undesirable results): 16-year-old Sally is writing an
email to her friend Latisha regarding a presentation they are doing
together the next day in their history class. Latisha has to say
something related to development of European alphabets. Sally puts some
example words into the email using Latin and the corresponding
Phoenician as a comparison, so that Latisha can put that into her
presentation boards / slides. The email is received as plain text,
however, and Latisha's mail client formats it in square Hebrew glyphs.
Sally is the one that looked into Phoenician, so Latisha doesn't realize
there is an issue. The problem is not discovered until mid-way through
their presentation.
Alternate scenario (desireable results): Because Phoenician is encoded
distinctly from Hebrew, the plain-text email is still formatted in an
acceptable manner by Latisha's mail client, and the correct content is
put in the presentation.
This is one of many possible usage scenarios, and some will surely have
desirable or undesirable results under the *opposite* conditions. The
challenge is to identify a set of scenarios that reasonably cover the
various situations and issues that may arise -- or do our best to
imagine what those would be like -- and assess which choice leads to the
overall best results (recognizing that bad results in one scenarios
might be more or less costly than bad results in another).
Peter
Peter Constable
Globalization Infrastructure and Font Technologies
Microsoft Windows Division
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