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Re: TECH: Why this low-tech forum?

From:Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>
Date:Monday, May 3, 2004, 14:23
Hi!

Felix Ahlner <felix_ahlner@...> writes:
> I wonder, don't most of you find it rather annoying not being able to post > IPA, or even letter from let's say ┘ Polish onto this list?
One vote from me: I am not annoyed.
> Has there ever been any talks about a "real" list like phpBB or > such? I once programmed a language community in PHP, would you guys > here be interested in it?
I am definitely not interested in using a web browser for reading and posting to a list. I want to use an extensible thingy like GNUs in Emacs. It's much more flexible for me together with Procmail. Simply wait another ten to fifty years and all text mode tools will probably be Unicode aware. Until then, I have no problems sending/reading Sampa here and sending/receiving links to the Internet for further information, e.g. graphical demonstrations of conlang fonts, which will most probably not work with Unicode anyway. The problem with not using the least commom denominator is that you'd exclude people from interesting discussions just because you want a nicer interface.
> I even did a script for writing IPA letters, and it would be rather easy to > re-program it so that you write SAMPA (or whatever it's called) between the > tags <IPA> and </IPA>, then the text is transformed into the correct IPA > Unicode numbers. Or for those who prefer SAMPA, it would be possible having > a user option like "Don't translate SAMPA into IPA".
There is a Perl module at http://www.theiling.de/ipa that can translate from CXS/X-Sampa to Unicode IPA. **Henrik