From: James Kass (jameskass@att.net)
Date: Mon May 24 2004 - 11:22:41 CDT
John Hudson wrote,
> > Also, I'm having trouble understanding why Semitic scholars wouldn't
> > relish the ability to display modern and palaeo-Hebrew side-by-side
> > in the same plain text document.
>
> Because they want to search documents in the
> Hebrew *language* using Hebrew characters in
> search strings?
>
> Because they don't want to guess
> in what script variant an online corpus is encoded
> when doing searches?
Guessing's not their job. It's up to a sophisticated search
engine to find what users seek. Some of us have tried to
dispel some of these fears by pointing out possible solutions.
Do we allow current technology, such as present search engine
constraints, to dictate what we encode? Or is search engine
technology beyond the scope of a plain text encoding standard?
Font and rendering technologies had to catch up with the
standard, as you know -- the idea that "complex scripts"
couldn't even be *displayed* didn't stop them from being
encoded as complex scripts in the standard.
Can a Sanskrit scholar find Sanskrit text on-line if the search
string uses Devanagari characters and the on-line text is in
a different script? Should the Indic scripts have been unified
for this reason?
> Because plain-text distinction
> of script variant text in the same language is just
> about the least important thing in their work?
Because they've never had the ability to do this in the past?
> Because they have yet to see a good argument for
> why anyone would need to make such a distinction?
Because it's there? If Sir Edmund Hillary (hope the name's spelled
right) had awaited some kind of an epiphany revealing a better
reason, would he have ever made it to the top?
You've asked some good questions here. It's hoped that my answers
aren't just sententious.
Best regards,
James Kass
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