Fwd: article on multilingual internet

[Andrew Cunningham]

Interesting article trying to address a complicated issue.

as indicated ISO/IEC 8859-8 and SI 1311 (used for Hebrew) could be in
visual or logical form, but what the article seems to neglect is that
ISO/IEC 8859-6 and ASMO 708 (used for Arabic) is logical. Unicode
would have needed a unified approach to directionality, esp since
other scripts (Syriac, Thaana and N'ko) are also written right to
left. Nor does it mention that one of the requirements of Unicode was
backwards compatibility with existing national standards. This,
combined with the lack of a visual encoding for Arabic ... and that
some of the early Thaana and Syriac solutions tended to leverage off
Arabic support ...

Nor is there a discussion around the limitations on constraints on
typesetting and typography caused by 8-bit encodings

Nor the issues of supporting minority languages on the web using
non-IANA registered encodings.

Nor typesetting requirements of academic use of Hebrew not supported
by ISO/IEC 8859-8

Nor the need, in some cases, to mix Hebrew (or Arabic script) text
with text in other languages.

Just some initial impressions.

The reality is that we still have a long way to go in developing a
multilingual web, but I suspect that encoding and directionality
issues are the least of the problems. HTML and CSS is heavily
influenced by Western European typographic and typesetting
conventions. But that said some interesting work is occurring:
improvements to bidirectional support in HTML5 and CSS3, Ruby,
additions to text layout, lists and fonts in CSS3,etc.

The Japanese Layout Task Force has published a fascinating document on
the typesetting needs of Japanese on the web. Ideally other languages
and scripts should receive similar attention.

Andrew


On 13 December 2011 06:22, Phillip E Cash Cash
<cashcash at email.arizona.edu> wrote:
> fyi...
>
> The author gave his generous permission to post this link to ILAT.
> Thanks Nicholas.
>
> Phil
> UofA
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Nicholas John <nikjohn at gmail.com>
> Date: Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 12:52 AM
> Subject: article on multilingual internet
> To: cashcash at u.arizona.edu
>
>
> Dear Phillip
>
> I'm writing to tell you about an article I've written on the
> multilingual internet. You and the members of the mailing list you run
> may find it interesting.
>
> A pre-publication draft is available here:
> http://www.sociothink.com/The%20Construction%20of%20the%20Multilingual%20Internet%20pre-final%20draft%20Nicholas%20John.pdf
>
> The article is titled "The Construction of the Multilingual Internet:
> Unicode, Hebrew and Globalization"
> I hope this is of some interest,
>
> Best
> Nicholas
>
> @nicholasajohn
> www.sociothink.com



-- 
Andrew Cunningham
Senior Project Manager, Research and Development
Vicnet
State Library of Victoria
Australia

andrewc at vicnet.net.au
lang.support at gmail.com