From: Marion Gunn (mgunn@egt.ie)
Date: Wed Jan 24 2007 - 08:32:59 CST
Thanks for your clarification, Addison, which, as usual, makes sense.
On 24 Jan 2007, at 04:58, scríobh Addison Phillips:
> To be very specific, far more of the Web consists of Britney Spears
> than it does of supplemental characters. As an epitaph for our
> civilization, perhaps not very promising.
Whose civilization would that be, now?:-)
mg
2007-01-24 14:32 GMT
On 23 Jan 2007, at 18:59, Addison Phillips:
> Hi Marion,
>
> Thanks for the note. If we were talking about the distribution of
> *language* text, I would agree. But the measurement of markup as a
> relation to actual text is different. HTML tags and other markup
> are not language-bearing text and they consistently form about half
> the overall "content" of the textual part(as opposed to graphics or
> music files and such) of the Web. If we omit the markup, the range
> and relative distribution of various scripts has evolved over time,
> away from total domination by Latin scripts towards a more natural
> distribution (notably Chinese in recent years and, I predict, much
> more of the Indic scripts in this decade).
>
> But even if we all switched to cuneiform for writing our languages,
> the total volume of the Web that used supplemental characters would
> only approach 50%, since half of the Web is angle brackets and
> such :-).
>
> It's a sneaky argument, but a valid one nonetheless.
>
> Best Regards,
>
> Addison
- -
Marion Gunn * EGTeo (Estab.1991)
27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn, Baile an
Bhóthair, Co. Átha Cliath, Éire.
* mgunn@egt.ie * eamonn@egt.ie *
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