Dean A. Snyder wrote, > The issue is not what we CAN do; the issue is what will we be FORCED to > do that already happens right now by default in operating systems, > Google, databases, etc. without any end user fiddling?
That's the question. Since search engines like Google survive based on their ability to serve users' wants and find what users seek, why wouldn't Google make such a tailoring? I don't have any contacts at Google, so don't know who to ask. But, IMHO Google is one of the best search engines available. From observation, they seem to "roll with the punches" quite well. They seem to be "first" with multilingual and Unicode-based search capabilities, multilingual user interfaces, and they even have a beta translator which has given many hours of amusement. (Google interface in Hebrew, http://www.google.com/intl/iw/ ) Plus, they clearly *like* to be avant-garde, even if it takes a little extra work. (They also have user interfaces in Klingon and various other interesting languages. Although many of their language-based interfaces transliterate to Latin, one suspects that this is only because of the lack of widespread system support for many complex scripts, and that this will change when appropriate.) If giving Phoenician script and Hebrew script equivalence for searching purposes means that scholars can use their service to find what they want, it seems only natural that the good folks at Google would do the job right. > Obviously for the statistically fewer custom applications we would write > software. Although perhaps statistically fewer, it would seem to be just as obvious that the most useful applications in your work would be custom out of necessity. A custom application, for example, would allow the user to set a font for showing, say, cuneiform glyphs in the private use area to display custom file names. But, a default application might just substitute an inappropriate font willy-nilly. > But it would seem that encoding defaults should mirror script-user defaults. Would it be fair to say that people who don't use the Phoenician script aren't members of its user community? Best regards, James Kass
