[Foundation-l] Frustration with the conversion engines issue

[Aryeh Gregor]

On Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 3:49 AM, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> When you declare one version canonical the risk is that you will have
> supporters of the losing version(s) becoming irrationally angry.

Which version was canonical is an implementation detail that wouldn't
even be visible to contributors, so this isn't a big deal.  Wikis have
to pick a canonical display type right now anyway for anonymous users
who haven't specified a preference, right?

On Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 5:38 AM, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:
> Even in the most simplest cases, like Serbian script conversion is,
> conversion is not transitive (however, intransitivity is small and
> approximation works good enough).

*That's* what would pose difficulties, yes.

> Of course, it is possible to solve it by testing are the surrounding
> letters are capital or not (as well as it is not a big deal in
> Serbian). However, this is a very simple case for conversion rules.
> Usually, it is much cheaper to do conversion at the time of
> adding/changing text and to keep both versions inside of databases.
> Because there are two different sets of rules for conversion. The
> other option is to keep one meta text inside of database, which would
> have internal markup. So, the previous example may look like "{Latin:
> {DŽ}AK}".

I suspect this would be feasible to get working to an acceptable
level, but only with a lot of effort.  Natural languages are really
messy.  :(