Re: ASCII convention

Helmut Richter wrote:
>
> Peter T. Daniels:
>
> > Andreas Prilop wrote:
>
> >> Is this really the Peter T. Daniels who edited
> >> the book "The world's writing systems" or
> >> is it just a bot to discredit the name of Peter Daniels?
> >
> > WWS was made in 1993-95. Absolutely none of these issues (or
> > "solutions") is relevant.
>
> It was irrelevant for making the book. It may be irrelevant for all topics
> covered in the book. It may be irrelevant for most future research about
> writing systems. And yet I feel somewhat uneasy about this commitment to
> ignorance.
>
> The development of standards like SGML or Unicode or CSS or whatever has
> shown that the discernment
>
> - of the content of a text from its visible presentation
>
> - of the pure text information (that is, sequence of characters) from
> other features of text that convey information to the reader (font
> usage, colours, indentation)
>
> - of the meaning of non-character information from its graphical
> appearance
>
> - of characters from the glyphs representing them
>
> are all non-trivial problems because the different layers are intertwined.
> One would expect that the persons trying to provide the necessary
> definitions in standards (as for instance in the first 150 pages of the
> Unicode standard) and the persons who have studied writing systems in
> other contexts would work together to find a common language which is both
> suitable for the purpose and scientifically correct. Refusal to learn what
> the problems are is refusal to contribute to the solutions.

>From a writing systems mailing list, I'm getting an idea of what a total
mess the Unicode glossary is, and of the attitude of some of its
mainstays toward the _users_ of writing systems, as opposed to
convenient computer solutions to perceived problems that often are not
the problems perceived by the users at all. Unfortunately Unicode seems
to have been undertaken by computer engineers _without_ input from any
of the relevant sorts of scholars (including sociolinguists) who should
have been consulted; their first recourse seems to have been to
government bureaucracies.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.

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