comments on writing system tutorial

Hi Richard,

Here are some comments on the writins system tutorial:

- General: It might be helpful to start with and overview of your basic 
terms like script, language, character, ..., and their relation (e.g. a 
language can be written with different scripts and / or mixed scripts).
- "There are a few local characters, such as for Cantonese in Hong Kong, 
that are not in widespread use. In Chinese these ideographs are called 
hanzi. They are often referred to as Han characters ... Unicode supports 
over 70,000 Han characters." This is confusing.
- "Note that each of the large glyphs ..." You should introduce the 
glyph concept, or mention that you will explain it later.
- "... for grammatical particles and endings." -> "to express 
grammatical information like time,  and various particles."
- example from indic script?
- "Before getting into this section it is important to draw attention to 
the difference between characters and glyphs. A character is a semantic 
unit representing an indivisible unit of text in memory. A glyph is the 
visual representation of a character or sequence of characters."
You could summarize the relations between char and glyph before going 
into detail - 1:1 (common(?) case), 1:n (e.g. historic variants of 
char), n:1 (e.g. ligatures).
- "Vertically oriented text is still very common .." Delete "still".
- Section on word boundaries: This is from a former co-worker at an 
TEI-task force [1], John Smith [2], an Indologist. It might be another 
interesting example, although it is too long for the tutorial and it 
goes beyond character encoding problems, which can only be solved with 
markup:
"difficulty arises within the Devana¯garı¯ script in which Sanskrit is 
normally written. Devana¯garı¯ is a syllabary, in which one syllable 
consists of any number of consonants (in practice, from zero to five) 
followed by one vowel followed optionally by m. or h. (anusva¯ra or 
visarga).1 If a word ends in a consonant, it therefore has to share a 
syllable with the next word, so that a¯ sı¯d ra¯ja¯ (‘there was a king’) 
is written a¯ - sı¯ - dra¯ - ja¯ . To make matters worse, sandhi 
(phonological change at word boundaries) may fuse two consecutive vowels 
together, so that, even ignoring orthography, the words can no longer be 
divided — for example tatha¯ api (‘even so’) becomes tatha¯pi, where the 
single vowel a¯ is shared by two inseparable words."

Best regards,

Felix

[1] www.tei-c.org
[2] http://bombay.oriental.cam.ac.uk/

Btw, which tutorials are for www05?

Richard Ishida wrote:

>In preparation (still) for the WWW2005 tutorial day I have (finally) produced another tutorial entitled:
>
>Ruby Markup and Styling
>http://www.w3.org/International/tutorials/ruby/
>
>Comments can be sent.
>I haven't added the text views yet.  I plan to review the wording again next week.
>
>Cheers,
>RI
>
>
>============
>Richard Ishida
>W3C
>
>contact info:
>http://www.w3.org/People/Ishida/ 
>
>W3C Internationalization:
>http://www.w3.org/International/ 
>
>Publication blog:
>http://people.w3.org/rishida/blog/
> 
>
>
>  
>

Received on Thursday, 28 April 2005 06:02:23 UTC