I have just spent several hours reading through all of the postings of the last few weeks related to the problems arising from the current combining classes for Hebrew vowels. I appreciate how much thought so many people have given to this issue.
I am an owner of a small software company that makes learning software. We use Unicode throughout and have received compliments from our customers about how user-friendly our Hebrew support is, particularly on entry of nekudot. The current Unicode vowels have been a problem for us. Because the combining classes are wrong, our software ignores vowel combining classes. We wrote custom software to handle multiple vowels on a letter. Frankly, I would welcome the "disruption" of correcting the combining classes of existing Hebrew vowels. It would allow us to retire code that we didn't want to write in the first place and would rather not maintain. Can anyone point to, describe, or even hypothesize a useful application for the current combining class assignments for Hebrew vowels? Nevertheless, it seems that changing combining classes is harder than changing the Ten Commandments (to keep with the Biblical theme). For what it's worth, among the other proposals I've read so far, the one to use CGJ seems at the moment to be the one that, for us, would do the least harm. However, we have not fully evaluated the impact of any of these on our software. >From a business perspective, having to support two Hebrew vowel systems would be anathema to us. The proposed change would have a direct, negative impact on us and on our customers. On us, because our software is not application-specific. We support both "modern Hebrew" and "Biblical Hebrew". (The quotes are because we don't actually make such a distinction.) On our customers, because they would have to learn and understand the subtle differences between Hebrew vowels and Biblical Hebrew vowels. Our user interface would have to change in ways that I don't even want to think about. Functions like searching, sorting, and copy-and-paste from existing Biblical text materials would become a nightmare, not to mention documents that mix Biblical and modern text. (Here's a nice little scenario: copy a word, paste it into a "find" dialog, and then watch it not find the same word encoded with the other vowel system.) I can't imagine how we would explain all this to our typical user. If there were to be two Hebrew vowel systems in Unicode, I can tell you what we would do: move everything to the vowel system that behaves correctly. (Of course, we would then have to write migration software for all the existing text users have in our system, and design it to be transparent to our users. We would also have to think through how interaction with external applications would work; that wouldn't be transparent to our users. A lot of work, but much less than supporting two vowel systems internally.) At the core, this seems to be driven by politics between Unicode, ISO, IETF, and who knows who else. Speaking as someone with over 30 years experience in the computer industry, including a decade or so serving on technical standards committees at the U.S. and ISO levels, I can assert that seeking technical solutions to political problems is generally very bad news. I fully support trying to "do it right" by working through the political process with these other organizations. The time it takes is time well spent. Ted Hopp Ted Hopp, Ph.D. ZigZag, Inc. [EMAIL PROTECTED] +1-301-990-7453 newSLATE is your personal learning workspace ...on the web at http://www.newSLATE.com/
