> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf > Of D. Starner
> Scholars often need to seperate text by the particular > script the text was written in, often down to the > very scribe. That's done by storing it some sort > of tagged format, and having your search system > let you select based on the script--trivial in most > database systems. Phoencian and Hebrew are just a bit > broader than most distinctions. So, saying that, while people have asked for plain-text distinction of their text, they can accomplish what they need using markup, and it's not unreasonable to ask them to do so. Noted. That seems to me to be a greater level of inconvenience for the anti-unification paleographers as the pro-unification paleographers would face with distinct encodings (needing to fold character distinctions), and probably for implementers wanting to support both as well as for general users. But that's an initial reaction that would need to be backed up by more discerning analysis than "seems to me" provides. Usage scenario (undesirable results): 16-year-old Sally is writing an email to her friend Latisha regarding a presentation they are doing together the next day in their history class. Latisha has to say something related to development of European alphabets. Sally puts some example words into the email using Latin and the corresponding Phoenician as a comparison, so that Latisha can put that into her presentation boards / slides. The email is received as plain text, however, and Latisha's mail client formats it in square Hebrew glyphs. Sally is the one that looked into Phoenician, so Latisha doesn't realize there is an issue. The problem is not discovered until mid-way through their presentation. Alternate scenario (desireable results): Because Phoenician is encoded distinctly from Hebrew, the plain-text email is still formatted in an acceptable manner by Latisha's mail client, and the correct content is put in the presentation. This is one of many possible usage scenarios, and some will surely have desirable or undesirable results under the *opposite* conditions. The challenge is to identify a set of scenarios that reasonably cover the various situations and issues that may arise -- or do our best to imagine what those would be like -- and assess which choice leads to the overall best results (recognizing that bad results in one scenarios might be more or less costly than bad results in another). Peter Peter Constable Globalization Infrastructure and Font Technologies Microsoft Windows Division
