ISO 639 - New item approved - N'Ko

Richard Ishida ishida at w3.org
Fri Jun 9 20:53:25 CEST 2006


> The same way you write "don't" or "O'Toole". The typographic 
> quote is preferred and no one has demonstrated that e.g. 
> googling fails depending on whether the quote is smart or dumb.

So I put together a small html file as follows[1]:

<html>
<head>
<title>test</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>N&#x2019;Ko</p>
<p>N'Ko</p> <!-- ascii apostrophe -->
</body>
</html>


It may be possible to google to this page whether with a google search that
represents N{p}Ko with both types of punctuation - I'm not sure, I didn't
try yet - but users will typically want to search *within* the registry page
for an entry.  I tried searching for N'Ko (ASCII only) in the above HTML
file using in-page searching functions of IE, Firefox and Opera, and in each
case the search found the second entry only.

In the case of the actual registry, there currently is no N'Ko ASCII text,
and one would have to type N&#x2019;Ko to get a match, knowing the right
code point to use, and how to represent that as an NCR. You cannot google
that by typing in N'Ko. I don't think that situation is very helpful to the
average user.

> It opens the door to a never-ending maintenance of variants.

I doubt that in practise it will be never-ending.  But having just one entry
rather than a small number of common cases, in my mind, simply exchanges one
problem for another.

What I'm arguing for is at least one ASCII only version of N'Ko and other
names.

RI



[1] http://www.w3.org/2006/06/apostrophetest.html



============
Richard Ishida
Internationalization Lead
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)

http://www.w3.org/People/Ishida/
http://www.w3.org/International/
http://people.w3.org/rishida/blog/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ishida/
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no 
> [mailto:ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no] On Behalf Of 
> Michael Everson
> Sent: 09 June 2006 19:23
> To: ietf-languages at iana.org
> Subject: RE: ISO 639 - New item approved - N'Ko
> 
> At 18:57 +0100 2006-06-09, Richard Ishida wrote:
> >Why is it an problem to have 6 alternative ASCII forms of Micmac, if 
> >there really isn't a definitive name for the language in English?
> 
> Because not only are there six, but most of them aren't 
> ASCII. So how many versions do you want?
> 
> >Then, we need to ask ourselves how you write N'Ko in English.
> 
> The same way you write "don't" or "O'Toole". The typographic 
> quote is preferred and no one has demonstrated that e.g. 
> googling fails depending on whether the quote is smart or dumb.
> 
> >If the name is sometimes written with one punctuation mark and 
> >sometimes another in English, isn't that also a spelling variation?
> >Why not include both?  What does it matter?
> 
> It opens the door to a never-ending maintenance of variants.
> --
> Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com 
> _______________________________________________
> Ietf-languages mailing list
> Ietf-languages at alvestrand.no
> http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages
> 



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