Hello Gregg,

---------- Original Message ----------------------------------
From: Gregg Reynolds <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>d.  You don't need higher-level grammars like XML.  My own opinion is 
>that primary goal of an encoding design should be to migrate 
>intelligence out of the application and into the text, subject to the 
>syntactic constraints of a plain text encoding.  So long as you can give 
>a clear and concise definition of a particular semantic category, it is 
>a good candidate for encoding as plain text.

Well I think Unicode is useful as it is. Unicode is encoding the Arabic script 
rather than the Arabic language so IMHO the kinds of things we are asking of 
here fall into a higher level grammar. The problem that we are currently trying 
to address in regards to the Quran has already been addessed or being addressed 
for the Bible by OSIS (http://www.bibletechnologies.net/). In the OSIS XML 
specification, morphemes and other units of a word can be encoded using 
specific XML elements. Unicode is still the encoding model for the script level 
encoding and XML overlays to encode higher level semantic of the text. So 
basically we're talking about XML over Unicode. I think that is the way to go. 
Inventing our own character encoding model outside of Unicode is not going to 
receive support except from a handful of people. I believe in utilizing already 
available standards, especially when they "can" address the needs of the 
community. With XML over Unicode what we are discussing here ca
 n be done, and OSIS has already done it for the Bible using XML over Unicode. 
Check out their spec:
http://www.bibletechnologies.net/OSISUserManual21draft.dsp

Kind regards,
Mete



--
Mete Kural
Touchtone Corporation
714-755-2810
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