Kenneth Whistler wrote the following at 2:01 PM on Mon, Aug 26, 2002: >And an approach which strikes me as a much more useful and extensible >way to deal with this would be the concept of a "What's This?" >text accessory. Essentially a small tool that a user could select >a piece of text with (think of it like a little magnifying glass, >if you will), which will then pop up the contents selected, deconstructed >into its character sequence explicitly.
Good idea - the big attraction being extensibility. But a detraction is that it would typically mean multiple, or at least explicit, deployment at the application level on any given platform. (I'm presuming such a system service would present an optional API to application developers, who may or may not be using higher level system services for rendering text). But a font-based approach, being lower level, would be inherited by all software including that which bypasses all but the lowest level system services - there's nothing for application developers to do in such a scenario. Seems like it would be nice to have both solutions. Respectfully, Dean A. Snyder Scholarly Technology Specialist Center For Scholarly Resources, Sheridan Libraries Garrett Room, MSE Library, 3400 N. Charles St. The Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21218 office: 410 516-6850 mobile: 410 245-7168 fax: 410-516-6229 Digital Hammurabi: www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi Initiative for Cuneiform Encoding: www.jhu.edu/ice
