Michael Everson wrote:
There are already encodings suitable for all varieties of Northwest Semitic scripts. One can legitimately argue, as some have, that there are still some problems with the Hebrew and Syriac encodings, but not that we need anything more for the other NW Semitic languages other than some nice FONTS!
Which would not address the plain-text requirement to distinguish the scripts qua scripts.
Michael, can you briefly outline the points regarding this 'requirement'? The only one that has been repeatedly referred to in this too-long discussion is the Tetragrammaton usage; I'm not sure whether that constitutes a requirement for plain-text or not. What are the other points?
In discussions of whether to encode individual characters/glyphs -- and now, it seems, scripts/styles --, much seems to be made of whether there is a requirement to make a distinction in plain-text, while the question of whether there is a requirement to use plain-text in the first place gets asked less often.*
*Except by Jony, who is always encouraging us to use markup to make distinctions.
John Hudson
