Re: Suggestion to add "spacing between sentences" to CSS3 Line WD

>> "Define 'sentence'." is a command, not a reason.  Any way, maybe it is just
>> a cultural difference.  My mistake for taking it negatively.
>
>   "Define 'sentence'" is the first technical question to ask in order 
>to get closer to a solution.

In my culture that is a command, not a technical question.  A command as
response to a suggestion is impolite where I come from.

"It is very difficult to define a sentence.  Do you have any new ideas for
solving this fundamental problem?"  is more civil where I come from.

Any way, that is "water under the bridge" and I do agree that a solution
can not proceed if the sentence can not be reliably found in the text.


>The EOS charachter might be a solutions, 
>but, I guess, it's not W3C's job to define characters. That would have 
>to be the Unicode Consortium, or the ISO WG (is it 10646???).


The more I think about it, the more I realize it is not a reasonable
solution, because it comes down to the fact that user's aren't trained to
press an EOS key.

The only hope is for parsing.  I think the solution may lie in n-gram
statistics.  Any way, it is not our job to be experts in language
processing.  There may exist reliable solutions already which are not
resource heavy.  I do not know.


>   But even when defining the EOS character, there had to be first some 
>implementations, wider acceptance, etc., in order to be considered 
>seriously.
>
>   Plus, and that's a personal opinion, it wouldn't be used 
>consistently, as lots of similar facilities provided by editing software 
>is not. I'm the only one I know who does not use crlf for spacing 
>between paragraphs, or space to center words.


I agree to some extent, except note that <P> is not used consistently
either, and yet we have paragraph styles in CSS.

So a decent parser might be better than the results we have paragraph
formatting.

Any way, I predicted this would not be solved any time soon.  I feel I have
a stronger argument now when advising people to use double spaces on the
web, at least until lower common denominator (resolution, handicaps, etc)
disappear...  maybe in heaven :-)


>
>   And, BTW, commas also seperate sentences, but that's not always the case.

-Shelby Moore

Received on Monday, 16 December 2002 19:35:41 UTC