Kenneth Whistler wrote the following at 2:01 PM on Mon, Aug 26, 2002:
>And an approach which strikes me as a much more useful and extensible
>way to deal with this would be the concept of a "What's This?"
>text accessory. Essentially a small tool that a user could select
>a piece of text with (think of it like a little magnifying glass,
>if you will), which will then pop up the contents selected, deconstructed
>into its character sequence explicitly.
Good idea - the big attraction being extensibility. But a detraction is
that it would typically mean multiple, or at least explicit, deployment
at the application level on any given platform. (I'm presuming such a
system service would present an optional API to application developers,
who may or may not be using higher level system services for rendering
text). But a font-based approach, being lower level, would be inherited
by all software including that which bypasses all but the lowest level
system services - there's nothing for application developers to do in
such a scenario.
Seems like it would be nice to have both solutions.
Respectfully,
Dean A. Snyder
Scholarly Technology Specialist
Center For Scholarly Resources, Sheridan Libraries
Garrett Room, MSE Library, 3400 N. Charles St.
The Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21218
office: 410 516-6850 mobile: 410 245-7168 fax: 410-516-6229
Digital Hammurabi: www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi
Initiative for Cuneiform Encoding: www.jhu.edu/ice
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