From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Tue Jul 29 2003 - 12:48:17 EDT
At 12:34 PM 7/25/2003, Kenneth Whistler wrote:
> b. a minor political problem (that certain communities of Biblical
> scholars are badmouthing Unicode because it "can't fix its
> obvious mistakes")
Wasn't it Michael Everson who made the comment about fixing obvious
mistakes? I'm not aware of any Biblical scholars badmouthing Unicode: the
ones I know who have heard about Unicode are incredibly enthusiastic about
the prospect of having standardised text interchange for Biblical Hebrew.
The Society of Biblical Literature has been trumpeting Unicode on their
website: it is actually a bit embarassing that the level of support for
Unicode encoded Biblical Hebrew in systems and apps is not quite up to the
level that the SBL site might lead scholars to believe.
There are genuine concerns about some aspects of Unicode character
properties for Biblical Hebrew, and as recent discussion on this list
indicates there are lots of questions about the best way to encode some
elements of Biblical Hebrew text. There is a lot of development in this
area at the moment *because of Unicode* -- because people want to implement
Biblical Hebrew using Unicode and want to ditch the various non-standard
8-bit hacks --, so yes there are going to be criticisms and disagreements
because the standard is underdefined for Biblical Hebrew.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com
The sight of James Cox from the BBC's World at One,
interviewing Robin Oakley, CNN's man in Europe,
surrounded by a scrum of furiously scribbling print
journalists will stand for some time as the apogee of
media cannibalism.
- Emma Brockes, at the EU summit
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