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Nicole Mazzuca nicole at strega-nil.co
Thu May 28 21:02:34 BST 2020
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I would say, generally, that the base directionality of text is given by the script one is using, which is defined by the language tag. A language has a default script (for en-US, that's Latin), and if someone wants to change their script, it's very easy to do so via the script part of the lang tag, for example, yi-US (which is shorthand for yi-Hebr-US, and is RTL) vs yi-Latn-US (LTR).
Nicole
On Thu, May 28, 2020 at 11:43, solderpunk <solderpunk at SDF.ORG> wrote:
Ahoy!
Let's pick this issue up again, in its own thread this time.
My original proposal was that we add a new parameter to the text/gemini
media type to specify the human language a document is written in.
Following the lead of RFC1766, the parameter would be called "lang" and
take values based on ISO 639 language codes and ISO 3166 country codes.
As far as I recall, nobody actually objected to this as something we
should do in principle, instead we just got distracted by various edge
cases. But I guess I may as well ask now: does anybody think this is a
*bad* idea?
The two concerete motivations for adding this were:
1. Screenreaders need to know this information to know which settings to
use for their text-to-speech engine: the same letters correspond to
different sounds in different languages.
2. Search engines may want to to offer their users the ability to ask
for results only in a particular set of languages.
Can anybody think of additional likey use cases besides these?
Since these are the main motivations, that also means that "normal
clients" (i.e. for use by sighted human users) have minimal use for this
information and can more or less ignore it. So, in considering the edge
cases that came up, we should be thinking about screenreaders and search
engines, not the stuff that most people here are presumably using day to
day.
The first question was what to do if the parameter is not specified.
I was, and am, opposed to putting a default language in the spec.
In the case of a screenreader, it seems entirely sensible to me that the
user of any such screenreader should be able to specify their own
default based on their primary reading languages, and that the software
should make it easy to change this when it is clear there is a problem.
It's not really the Gemini spec's job to say anything about this.
The case of search engines is trickier, since their resulting database
does not have just one user but many. This was where autodetection
first came up, which some people seemed to get carried away with. Fully
generalised autodetection of language is computationally expensive and
it gives answers with some uncertainty. A large search engine project
*may* want to think about it - the idea of clients for humans users
doing it as a routine response to a lack of a lang parameter is nuts.
A simpler option for search engines might simply be to interpret a user
request of "only show me results in languages X" as "don't show results
*known* to be in languages other than X". i.e documents for which the
language is not known are always possible search results. This is
imperfect, but, well, sometimes life is.
In short, I am not sure that the lack of specified default behaviour is
a good reason not to go ahead with this.
The second question was what to do when a document contains text in
multiple languages. This is a trickier question. I'd prefer not to
define a new line type to handle it. We could at least allow the lang
parameter to accept multiple values separated by some delimiter. It
wouldn't be clear from that which parts were what, but it could at least
act as a strong hint to screenreaders. Search engines could include
such pages in results if any of the delcared languages matched one the
user had requested. Actually, perhaps that's a perfectly adequate
solution, in which case this is not trickier at all.
There's also the question of directionality, which I think might require
a separate parameter entirely. But let's focus on the language thing
for now. How does the above sound to people?
Cheers,
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