Re: evolution and hebrew

On Fri, 30 Sep 2005, Shai Berger wrote:

> You start out with lenient interpretation in one common client, 
> then people like Ron claim the other clients are buggy when they 
> refuse to implement the same leniency,

Just for the record -- I didn't say that strict clients are 
"buggy", I said they're less useful.

> The correct handling of noisy input is to make life harder on the 
> people who produce it

I agree. But there will always be noisy input, often coming from 
sources that are not so easy to identify, let alone fix. Some noisy 
input comes from human operators, like the travel agent who sent me 
a trip itinerary as an rtf file with all the text hidden inside 
picture elements (the only way I could read it was to open the file 
in emacs and look for short strings of plain language). Other noisy 
input comes from automatic processes, like search engines that read 
many many file formats, convert them (imperfectly) to html and 
produce (even less perfect) summaries. These things exist because 
they're useful -- I want my travel agent to send me an itinerary 
even if the only thing they can do is send the file that their 
system uses internally, and I want my search engine to find that 
slide presentation for me, even if the author put it online in a 
file format that the search engine can't (yet?) convert and display 
properly. So while I agree that we should put pressure on content 
producers to make their content as compliant as possible, I believe 
there's also room for smart processing on the client side.

Shana Tova, -Ron.
----
Ivrix-discuss list. See http://ivrix.org.il.
To unsubscribe, please send mail to [email protected] with
only the following line in the message body (NOT SUBJECT!): unsubscribe