From: Dean Snyder (dean.snyder@jhu.edu)
Date: Wed Mar 09 2005 - 14:46:16 CST
Andrew C. West wrote at 1:57 AM on Wednesday, March 9, 2005:
>> This is impressive. It supports everything Dean had asked for, and much
>> more (Debbie's quick summary doesn't even scratch the surface). It just
>> doesn't happen to involve new Unicode characters.
>>
>
>It certainly is impressive,
Actually the CONCEPTS are fairly well thought out but the IMPLEMENTATION
of those concepts in XML does not impress me, for the reason I've stated
elsewhere - they all use non-empty tags, which disallows overlapping
hierarchies, an ubiquitous feature in text streams.
>and it really confirms to me that any attempt to
>represent this sort of information in plain text using a new set of Unicode
>characters is doomed to failure. As I said previously if you are storing
>information about the state of a text in the text itself, you need to be
>able to
>record more than the fact that there is some unspecified damage to a certain
>quadrant of a character.
I've never suggested en masse substitution of encoded characters for
markup; I would, in fact, be strongly against it as being ludicrous. What
I have suggested is one small subset of epigraphic features as a
candidate for encoding. Obviously there is a whole world of epigraphic
features that belong in markup, but I suggest that the indication of the
very presence or absence of portions of the actual text should be a
feature enabled in plain text.
Respectfully,
Dean A. Snyder
Assistant Research Scholar
Manager, Digital Hammurabi Project
Computer Science Department
Whiting School of Engineering
218C New Engineering Building
3400 North Charles Street
Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21218
office: 410 516-6850
cell: 717 817-4897
www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi/
http://users.adelphia.net/~deansnyder/
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