Erik, thank you for the apologia.
I addressed your main point *implicitly* by talking
about something else. I.e. I was sort of refuting your
main point. (Lame excuse.)
I expect we could all benefit from a refresher course in how to best employ
rhetoric in debate :-)
My point is that it is too late to argue about these
things now since Unicode and 10646 are frozen. So we
should instead talk about how to salvage the wreck.
Agreed, but the wreck does need a bit of analysis if we are to provide a viable
fix, so *some* discussion seems in order.
Of course it's possible that the message gets garbled!
Thank you for admiting this, I had drawn the conclusion from my (admittedly
cursory) examination of the past 2 months traffic that this point hadnt been
yielded, or was being taken lightly by many of the posters---and that Ohta-san
was feeling rather frustrated over just that lack of ackowledgement.
If they set their Han font, then they *won't* see the
foreign variant.
Here you are assuming a dumb UA, I am postulating a need for a smarter one, for
which we need to consider support mechanisms.
If you prefer to see your ASCII in Helvetica or Courier,
then you set your font, right? Why would you see it in
an unfamiliar font like Fraktur?
The point I was trying to make here is that I might very well feel frustrated
over an inability to mix fractur (ie, into a discussion about german lute
tablature), and thus would benefit from the same mechanism. This in the hope of
defocussing us from the narrow (colonial? racist?) viewpoint that---we would be
doing this only to placate certain noisy asians---which was an undertone I was
beginning to read into the recent postings.
No program can correctly intuit fonts from "plain" text.
You cannot create information from nil.
true, but we have more than nil to work with here, admittedly our information is
imperfect, but I think an assesment of the degree of that imperfection is
usefull, if only to convince the 10646/unicode people of the need for
embellishment, or ourselves for the need for an inline/parallel information
structure. Unfortunatly, the research does go a bit beyond the norm for
IETF-822, still, we should solicit it from some sister body, wish I knew which
body that would be.
If the sender does not include font info, then you
cannot deduce the font(s).
obviously, a sender should be encouraged to do so, a standard means for doing it
would provide that encouragement.
You can use heuristics, but then you also assume the
responsibility for any mistakes.
indeed.
--
dana s emery <de19(_at_)umail(_dot_)umd(_dot_)edu>