Re: About that alphabetician...
On 25/09/2003 23:14, John Hudson wrote: At 10:23 AM 9/25/2003, Michael Everson wrote: Honestly it depends what kind of layman you are talking to. Many's the time I was beavering away on some proposal or other down the pub, and have been accosted with a "what are you doing?" Ah, but does bloke down the pub = typical New York Times reader? :) Or, on this occasion, did bloke down the pub = New York Times reporter? :-) Anyway, it's wonderful what a few pints of Guinness can do - even make Unicode simple! -- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
RE: About that alphabetician...
At 10:23 AM 9/25/2003, Michael Everson wrote: Honestly it depends what kind of layman you are talking to. Many's the time I was beavering away on some proposal or other down the pub, and have been accosted with a "what are you doing?" Ah, but does bloke down the pub = typical New York Times reader? :) JH Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC [EMAIL PROTECTED] You need a good operator to make type. If it were a DIY affair the caster would only run for about five minutes before the DIYer burned his butt off. - Jim Rimmer
Unicode 4.0 book (was: Re: About that alphabetician...)
That alphabetician wrote: > And on tis very day, my copy of Unicode 4.0 has arrived. :-) Shipping takes longer to IE than to US. (Oops, I just used ISO's intellectual property.) I received my copy a few weeks ago, and just noticed the new section 5.19, "Unicode Security" (pp. 140-142), which includes, to my surprise and glee, a subsection on "Spoofing" that borrows heavily from my e-mail of 2002-02-15: http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2002-m02/0304.html right down to the word "albeit." :-) I am delighted that the book committee found these suggestions useful. -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
Re: About that alphabetician...
Of course, any Unicode character can be expressed as an XML character reference (e.g. म) in any web page encoding, even US-ASCII. -- Curtis Clark http://www.csupomona.edu/~jcclark/ Mockingbird Font Works http://www.mockfont.com/
Re: About that alphabetician...
I already wrote this up internally as a bug. Thanks, Deborah On 2003/09/25, at 14:05, Tom Gewecke wrote: About the c-cedilla, it appears that OS X Safari does not pick up the charset on this page. If the default is set to UTF-8, the c disappears altogether. The correct character is displayed only if the browser is set by default or manually to Latin 1.
RE: About that alphabetician...
About the c-cedilla, it appears that OS X Safari does not pick up the charset on this page. If the default is set to UTF-8, the c disappears altogether. The correct character is displayed only if the browser is set by default or manually to Latin 1.
Re: About that alphabetician...
At 13:19 -0700 2003-09-25, James Caldwell wrote: Congratulations! You have given Unicode a tremendous boost with this interview, published in the New York Times! I am sure it will bring many positive results for our work and for your career. Thank you very much. Please give generously to the Script Encoding Initiative http://www.unicode.org/sei if you can. -- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
Re: About that alphabetician...
Thanks for the tip. There's must be something wrong with my machine. If anyone has any suggestions for how to troubleshoot this, please email me privately. On 9/25/03 1:54 PM, "John Burger" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Brian Doyle wrote: > >> The observation that I, the ³Irish (American) colleague,² made to >> Michael >> was that there is a sentence in the NYT article displayed in my >> browser that >> dropped the OOE7 LATIN SMALL LETTER C WITH CEDILLA (e.g., François). > > The c-cedilla is really there, I see it in three browsers on my Mac > (Camino, Safari, and IE). > > - John Burger > MITRE >
RE: About that alphabetician...
At 05:41 PM 9/25/03 +0100, Richard Ishida wrote: Aha. Maybe, next time I try to explain it on the plane, I'll say something like: "Unicode is a standard for enabling your computer to represent all the letters of all the alphabets of the world." Still not terribly accurate and deliberately vague (and could refer in their mind to characters and/or fonts), but then the average layman probably wouldn't know or need to know it was innaccurate or vague. I usually like to say that "Unicode is a simply a list, you know, like a catalog, where you can find all the letters of all the alphabets of the world." That allows me to segue to the tasks that people perform. "If all the computers in the world use the same list, you can type in any language anywhere and people on the opposite end of the earth can read it." Why is this good? "If everybody uses their own list, as used to be the case, very often theres a mismatch and instead of text you get garbage, or random letters on your screen." For the longer answer (still for newbies) see the first part of my Unicode tutorial. A./
Re: About that alphabetician...
Brian Doyle wrote: The observation that I, the “Irish (American) colleague,” made to Michael was that there is a sentence in the NYT article displayed in my browser that dropped the OOE7 LATIN SMALL LETTER C WITH CEDILLA (e.g., François). The c-cedilla is really there, I see it in three browsers on my Mac (Camino, Safari, and IE). - John Burger MITRE
Re: About that alphabetician...
At 12:49 -0500 2003-09-25, Brian Doyle wrote: The observation that I, the "Irish (American) colleague," made to Michael was that there is a sentence in the NYT article displayed in my browser that dropped the OOE7 LATIN SMALL LETTER C WITH CEDILLA (e.g., François). There's nothing in the paragraph in question to indicate that there is a missing character--nor is there a numeric code displayed for a savvy user to look up. I see the ç when I view the page and I'm using Safari as you are. -- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
RE: About that alphabetician...
Michael Everson wrote: > At 08:33 -0700 2003-09-25, John Hudson wrote: > > >Unicode is an encoding standard for text on computers that allows > >documents in any script and language to be entered, stored, edited > >and exchanged. > > >>blank stare from layman<< Unicode is a code in which every letter of every alphabet in the world corresponds to a number. This numeric code is used to write text inside computers, because only can be written numbers inside computers. When the computer shows on the screen the text which it has inside, it draws the letters corresponding to the Unicode numbers which it has inside. My 4 years listened to this explanation and said everything was clear. The only problem is that he now wants to disassemble my computer to see the numbers it has inside. He thinks that the numbers are stored in the form of talking ladybugs which would say out the number when you tip on them (he gained this idea from one of his favorite books: "Learn the Numbers with the Talking Ladybugs"). _ Marco
Re: About that alphabetician...
Eric, Forgive my density. I¹m not sure that I understand. Are you arguing that an ASCII encoding scheme (ISO-8859-1) is not a limitation because, semantically, all of the characters (a, b, c, etc.) also exist in the Unicode scheme? It makes sense to me that ASCII is not a limitation for those documents that are limited to that character set. But, your own message, ³which contains U+10DB ? GEORGIAN LETTER MAN and U+092E Ã DEVANAGARI LETTER MA² triggers an error message in my own email client (Entourage X), namely: ³Some text in this message is in a langauge that your computer cannot display.² I¹m not certain if I¹m seeing this because I don¹t possess a font to display those characters or some other reason. I suspect that this is the reason because, when I try to look up those character's in OS X's Character Palette, the Georgian and Devongari Unicode blocks show up blank. The observation that I, the ³Irish (American) colleague,² made to Michael was that there is a sentence in the NYT article displayed in my browser that dropped the OOE7 LATIN SMALL LETTER C WITH CEDILLA (e.g., François). There's nothing in the paragraph in question to indicate that there is a missing character--nor is there a numeric code displayed for a savvy user to look up. Surely in this context, we would agree that the semantic content was distorted, yes? Sincerely, Brian Doyle Unicode newbie On 9/25/03 11:54 AM, "Eric Muller" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Michael Everson wrote: >> An Irish colleague here said he liked the article but noted that the Times' >> web directors don't use Unicode >> >> >>> ... >>> >>> ... >>> >>> > There is an alternative point of view, which says that charset declared in an > HTML (or XML) document is no more than an encoding scheme, and that all > characters in those documents are fundamentally Unicode characters (i.e. they > start in life with the full semantic of Unicode, they don't inherit it on the > occasion of character set conversion). That view is supported by the XML spec > itself, and by the infoset definition. And because we have numeric character > entities, using an iso-8859-1 encoding scheme is not really a limitation: > witness this message, which contains U+10DB ? GEORGIAN LETTER MAN and U+092E Ã > DEVANAGARI LETTER MA. > > Eric. > >
RE: About that alphabetician...
At 08:33 -0700 2003-09-25, John Hudson wrote: Unicode is an encoding standard for text on computers that allows documents in any script and language to be entered, stored, edited and exchanged. blank stare from layman<< I think it is best to relate the description to what the layman does: he types things, and he edits them and he sends them to other laymen. The 'big font' thing is a really bad idea because it is completely inaccurate: that's not informing the layman in terms he understands, that's misleading him. Only if you don't follow it up with a second sentence. I also think it is a good idea to include the word 'encoding', because if the rest of one's description is simple it can be a useful way to plant new terminology in someone's head. Honestly it depends what kind of layman you are talking to. Many's the time I was beavering away on some proposal or other down the pub, and have been accosted with a "what are you doing?" -- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
Re: About that alphabetician...
Michael wrote: > I was asked how I describe it briefly to laymen. And I usually say > "Unicode is like a big, giant font that is supposed to contain all > the letters of all the alphabets of all the languages in the world." Now, why do you suppose he removed *that* "like" and, like, left in all the others!? Rick
Re: About that alphabetician...
Michael Everson wrote: An Irish colleague here said he liked the article but noted that the Times' web directors don't use Unicode ... ... There is an alternative point of view, which says that charset declared in an HTML (or XML) document is no more than an encoding scheme, and that all characters in those documents are fundamentally Unicode characters (i.e. they start in life with the full semantic of Unicode, they don't inherit it on the occasion of character set conversion). That view is supported by the XML spec itself, and by the infoset definition. And because we have numeric character entities, using an iso-8859-1 encoding scheme is not really a limitation: witness this message, which contains U+10DB მ GEORGIAN LETTER MAN and U+092E म DEVANAGARI LETTER MA. Eric.
RE: About that alphabetician...
At 07:11 AM 9/25/2003, Hart, Edwin F. wrote: I like to say, "Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646 describe a single standard for representing the world's characters in computers as a series of numbers (zeros and ones)." Unicode is an encoding standard for text on computers that allows documents in any script and language to be entered, stored, edited and exchanged. I think it is best to relate the description to what the layman does: he types things, and he edits them and he sends them to other laymen. The 'big font' thing is a really bad idea because it is completely inaccurate: that's not informing the layman in terms he understands, that's misleading him. I also think it is a good idea to include the word 'encoding', because if the rest of one's description is simple it can be a useful way to plant new terminology in someone's head. I have not seen the article yet -- too little time with ATypI kicking off this evening --, but I'm sure Michael did a grand job otherwise. John Hudson Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC [EMAIL PROTECTED] You need a good operator to make type. If it were a DIY affair the caster would only run for about five minutes before the DIYer burned his butt off. - Jim Rimmer
RE: About that alphabetician...
An Irish colleague here said he liked the article but noted that the Times' web directors don't use Unicode Is maith liom an t-alt ach tá díomá orm feiceáil nach bfhuil Unicode in úsaid ag stiurthóirí gréasáin de chuid NYT. Seo cód an leathanaigh: ... ... For the World's A B C's, He Makes 1's and 0's -- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
RE: About that alphabetician...
At 10:11 -0400 2003-09-25, Hart, Edwin F. wrote: It is always a challenge to describe technology in terms that the lay person can understand. I like to say, "Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646 describe a single standard for representing the world's characters in computers as a series of numbers (zeros and ones)." Indeed. But the layman knows what a font is, and an alphabet. "Characters" has to come in the sentence after. ;-) -- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
Re: About that alphabetician...
And on tis very day, my copy of Unicode 4.0 has arrived. :-) -- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
Re: About that alphabetician...
One complaint: Very interesting. I didn't realize Unicode was a "large font", though... I thought it was a character encoding system, distinct from fonts, due to the character/glyph model :) Another complaint: Some purist will try to kill you for calling Unicode "a big, giant font ..." I was asked how I describe it briefly to laymen. And I usually say "Unicode is like a big, giant font that is supposed to contain all the letters of all the alphabets of all the languages in the world." -- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
