From: Gregg Reynolds (unicode@arabink.com)
Date: Thu Mar 10 2005 - 11:30:18 CST
Dean Snyder wrote:
> Asmus Freytag wrote at 8:48 PM on Wednesday, March 9, 2005:
>
>
>>At 07:36 PM 3/9/2005, Dean Snyder wrote:
>>
>>>I've made it very clear that THE basis for my thinking on encoding damage
>>>indicators is to enable "guaranteed" integrity for damaged, interchanged
>>>plain text.
>>
>>A similar argument could be made for the absolute integrity of mathematical
>>expressions. More people (users) rely on textual representations of
>>mathematical
>>expressions in their work than on transcriptions of damaged plain text, and
>>in many cases there are potentially severe consequences if mathematical
>>expressions are inadvertently altered.
>
>
> The difference between mathematical notation and my suggested
> application, ancient texts, is that every ancient document is a unique
> autograph and it is important to maintain a minimum of textual integrity
> for all plain text representations of those documents.
>
But you aren't encoding text, you're encoding a description of a
physical artifact. I personally don't see the harm in what you propose,
but transcribing "text" (whatever that means) and encoding information
about the medium in which the original message is inscribed are
different things. Couldn't the logic you suggest could also be used to
support the encoding of "characters" to describe an indecipherable audio
transmission as "plaintext" (whatever that means)? E.g. <plosive> or
the like, meaning, sounds like a /t/ or maybe a /k/ or a /p/ or maybe
something else, as in "that is one cool ca<plosive>". After all,
Unicode is a writing system in itself and shouldn't be construed (IMO)
merely as a system for transcribing written messages.
-gregg
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