Mete Kural wrote:
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

Hi,

It's certainly possible to create an XML grammar for the Quran, but surely e.g. an "ikhfaa" codepoint makes more sense than something like <ikhfaa/>. And Unicode is undoubtedly useful; it just isn't useful enough.

-g
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