🚀 go-pugleaf

David J Birnbaum (djbpitt+@pitt.edu) writes:
>Concerning the former, I would normally require that my texts include
>language identification, so that the same "this is Bulgarian" or "this
>is Russian" information would be present in both a Unicode-based system
>and Vadim's system, although it would not be an inalienable part of the
>character set in the former. Thus, I would be "stuck with" language
>information under both systems. While Unicode is capable of
>representing text without language information (by eschewing the use of
>tags), I can't think of a situation where I would want to do so.

This I don't understand. If you throw away a short e-mail message
to a friend, why would it be necessary to tag the text with the 
language?

And why would "this is Bulgarian" be different from "this is a text
about motorcycles"?

I don't doubt that there are many situations you want to keep track
of which language a text is written in, but what I question is that
the language should is the only such important property. Peter Da
Silva discussed SGML tags in another article, and intuitively it seems
to me that SGML tags is precisely what you are looking for.

It is also worth noting that while plain Unicode you can send away
an untagged e-mail without problems, you cannot doing so with Vadim
Antonov suggests as far as I understand. If all you have is a number
of small 8-bit sets, then you must tag the text with the set being
used if you expect the receptor's default set being another than
the one you use, else the text may come up as garbage.
-- 
Erland Sommarskog - ENEA Data, Stockholm - sommar@enea.se
Jag gav en k{ck tjeck en check.