On 06/11/2001 10:49:54 AM Antoine Leca wrote:
>So you should consider also "m", "r", "s", "t", "è" (U+00E0) and "é"
(U+00E1).
>
>Looks like a bit too much to me.
I'm not in a position to argue for or against these kinds of things in
plain text for Italian, French, etc. where the orthographies clearly do not
include superscripts as separate graphemes but rather these are notational
devices that supplement the orthography. Italics, bold and underlining are
also used to mean certain things, but clearly don't belong encoded as
character data. For things like 1e, I'm not sure where to draw the line.
For phonetic and phonemic transcriptions, though, I'm inclined to say that
superscripts do belong in plain text. One might say that, like math
equations, there is a level of meaning that goes beyond text and requires a
richer level of format and layout control. But for math equations, there
really is a lot that needs to be handled at that level. For phonetic /
phonemic transcriptions, on the other hand, this is the only thing that in
any way is questionable. I see no point in creating some specification for
phonetic transcription markup just to handle superscripts. That means that
if they are going to be representable in unformatted text -- and I think
they should be -- then characters will be needed for them.
- Peter
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Constable
Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International
7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA
Tel: +1 972 708 7485
E-mail: <peter_constable@sil.org>
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