b. a minor political problem (that certain communities of Biblical
scholars are badmouthing Unicode because it "can't fix its
obvious mistakes")
Wasn't it Michael Everson who made the comment about fixing obvious mistakes? I'm not aware of any Biblical scholars badmouthing Unicode: the ones I know who have heard about Unicode are incredibly enthusiastic about the prospect of having standardised text interchange for Biblical Hebrew. The Society of Biblical Literature has been trumpeting Unicode on their website: it is actually a bit embarassing that the level of support for Unicode encoded Biblical Hebrew in systems and apps is not quite up to the level that the SBL site might lead scholars to believe.
There are genuine concerns about some aspects of Unicode character properties for Biblical Hebrew, and as recent discussion on this list indicates there are lots of questions about the best way to encode some elements of Biblical Hebrew text. There is a lot of development in this area at the moment *because of Unicode* -- because people want to implement Biblical Hebrew using Unicode and want to ditch the various non-standard 8-bit hacks --, so yes there are going to be criticisms and disagreements because the standard is underdefined for Biblical Hebrew.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC [EMAIL PROTECTED]
The sight of James Cox from the BBC's World at One,
interviewing Robin Oakley, CNN's man in Europe,
surrounded by a scrum of furiously scribbling print
journalists will stand for some time as the apogee of
media cannibalism.
- Emma Brockes, at the EU summit
