A 20:32 07/01/98 GMT, John Clews a écrit :
>Don't forget that ISO NP 15924 is NOT an IT standard, so not all
>users of this standard will have the opportunity to do such
>conversions by computers, even though such codes may well nbe useful
>in IT systems. Meaningful alphabetic codes are therefore likely to be
>useful.
[Alain] :
Dont't ignore the fact that for ISO 639 or ISO 3166, which are similar in
nature, I often have to go to a list to check what « IL » means for example
(Israël, and not Italy) or what « iu » means, and that most Californians
think that CA means their state rather than Canada. If you have to check in
a list, then the advantage of mnemonicity is not that big, and these days,
I don't know many people who have to use such codes who do not use
computers. Computers are not just typewriters, they are there to help in
that type of things. A catalog number is the most universal thing, it is
efficient, it can be presented to the end-user using his own language of
choice. And, should the entry be done in this language, the code can be
produced and rendered in another language on the other side of the earth.
These are user requirements, not machine requirements.
Alain LaBonté
Québec
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:38 EDT