Re: Priority for Techniques Dealing with Foreign Language Markup

I'm not sure if I agree or not.

Maybe the problem should be re-expressed into marking up the Character 
set. I can read a bit of Japanese and Greek, but if the character set is 
not marked, and the language is not marked, then I simply have to guess 
at all the character sets I can think of. Then if I make a lucky guess, I 
have to work out a font.

This is from the perspective of a sighted user. I can recognise whether I 
am dealing with Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Thai at a glance. (Although 
I may get Thai confused with Khmer, or other languages close by).

With a hint from the origin of the document, it gets a little easier. But 
for me it seems that to compund that problem with one of lack of Language 
markup and ask a braille translator or speech synthesis system to make 
any sense at all is ridiculous.

If it would help anyone, I will make up some pages in a few different 
languages (chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, French, German, 
Russian) and post them with no markup so people can try them out.

Charles McCathieNevile

Received on Wednesday, 18 November 1998 02:23:35 UTC