Shawalphabet YahooGroup Archive Browser

On Apr 2, 2005 3:13 PM, John Burrows <burrows@...> wrote:
>
> Postings from yahoo groups come as digests

You can change that, though -- for example, by logging into the Y!G
website http://groups.yahoo.com/group/shawalphabet/ and clicking on
"Edit Membership"; you'll be given the option to receive digests or
individual messages (or only special notices or no messages at all).

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>

> I was checking out this issue, too. I looked at a few
> of my old messages that were supposed to be HTML (however
> reliable that is), but it was all Roman. I think the
> problem is that Yahoo!'s new Style Sheets are overriding
> the fonts in our messages.

Oh eep. That could very well be the case.

So that makes reading messages through the web archive so much less
reliable.

> The combination would make non-Unicode Shavian impossible
> to use on the Web interface.

*nods*

Though it's possible that using <font> instead of CSS, or vice versa, may
work -- but that only helps if you can influence that HTML generated (e.g.
when you're coding emails by hand, rather than using an email client's rich
text feature).

> In the mean time, though, it seems like those of us using
> the Web interface are stuck with the Unicode gap.

At least for those who can read Unicode Shavian.

Cheers,
Philip

On 4/4/05 3:12 AM, "Newton, Philip" <Philip.Newton@...> wrote:

>> The combination would make non-Unicode Shavian impossible
>> to use on the Web interface.
>
> *nods*
>
> Though it's possible that using <font> instead of CSS, or vice versa, may
> work -- but that only helps if you can influence that HTML generated (e.g.
> when you're coding emails by hand, rather than using an email client's rich
> text feature).

I guess that's true. I don't know how to do that. I also don¹t know what
Entourage is doing with my messages. It says they¹re HTML, but I don¹t know
how it¹s handling the fonts. All HTML messages seem to appear correctly,
though.

>> In the mean time, though, it seems like those of us using
>> the Web interface are stuck with the Unicode gap.
>
> At least for those who can read Unicode Shavian.

Yes, that is the problem; hence the gap. I wonder if we could make a
Unicode Shavian decoder that would convert between Unicode and the
non-Unicode mapping, or even replace text with images for those without
fonts. It probably wouldn¹t be too hard to make a program that would parse
HTML taken from the Yahoo! Group page, would it? Of course, I¹m not the
person to do it...

Regards,
Joe Spicer
/JO spFsD

This is an interesting point (that of Yahoo's "new look" overriding fonts).
I'll check and see if my messages too are being corrupted.



If it were the case I doubt Yahoo would change their look across thousands
of groups just for us. They didn't lend us any help when we had no
moderator, what makes us think they're going to pay attention for us now...



Hugh B



_____

From: Joe [mailto:wurdbendur@...]
Sent: 04 April 2005 00:19
To: Shaw Alphabet
Subject: Re: [shawalphabet] Re: Fwd: another try



I was checking out this issue, too. I looked at a few of my old messages
that were supposed to be HTML (however reliable that is), but it was all
Roman. I think the problem is that Yahoo!'s new Style Sheets are overriding
the fonts in our messages. Of course, it's also likely that Yahoo! doesn't
handle rich text. The combination would make non-Unicode Shavian impossible
to use on the Web interface. I'm almost certain this is the case: Several
old messages which appeared perfectly before now do not. Maybe we should
bring this to the attention of Yahoo!. In the mean time, though, it seems
like those of us using the Web interface are stuck with the Unicode gap.

Regards,
Joe Spicer
/JO spFsD



On 4/3/05 1:20 AM, "Philip Newton" <philip.newton@...> wrote:

>
> On Apr 3, 2005 8:14 AM, dshepx <dshep@...> wrote:
>>
>> Would you retrieve message 839 (the one you reported
>> came through correctly) from the archives to see if it can
>> still be viewed as it was meant to be seen.
>
> It appears in Roman to me. However, I suspect that this would have
> been the case even at the time I received the message, since the "rich
> text" bit uses the MIME text/enriched content type, which some email
> clients support but which browsers do not (TTBOMK). Neither, I
> suppose, does the Yahoo!Groups web interface, so it simply displays
> the text/plain part, which cannot have any formatting applied to it.
>
> So even if more people had email clients supporting text/enriched, it
> would still appear in plain text in the web archives.
>
> Cheers,



_____

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> > In the mean time, though, it seems like those of us using
> > the Web interface are stuck with the Unicode gap.
>
> At least for those who can read Unicode Shavian.

And that's not very many.

I've just taken a look at the Yahoo web interface and looked back through
the last few weeks' messages. The fonts still show fine for me (if a little
mis-sized at times). Joe, how far back did you look to find messages that
didn't show right? Have you got an example date I could check myself?

Cheers
Hugh B

Well, it¹s definitely a long shot. But if this is the case, then it¹s an
issue that could affect the people on all those thousands of groups, could
be fixed with little effort, and doesn¹t involve the permissions issues of
changing moderators.

It¹s probably still best to check into it further, though.

Regards,
Joe Spicer
/JO spFsD



On 4/4/05 4:18 PM, "Hugh Birkenhead" <mixsynth@...> wrote:

> This is an interesting point (that of Yahoo¹s ³new look² overriding fonts).
> I¹ll check and see if my messages too are being corrupted.
>
> If it were the case I doubt Yahoo would change their look across thousands of
> groups just for us. They didn¹t lend us any help when we had no moderator,
> what makes us think they¹re going to pay attention for us now...
>
> Hugh B

Sorry, I just realized that it's my browser causing the problems for me. I
was using Safari, which can behave strangely sometimes. FireFox displays it
correctly. That said, I have no idea what could be causing other people's
problems.

Regards, and sorry about the confusion,
Joe Spicer
/JO spFsD




On 4/4/05 4:28 PM, "Hugh Birkenhead" <mixsynth@...> wrote:

>> At least for those who can read Unicode Shavian.
>
> And that's not very many.
>
> I've just taken a look at the Yahoo web interface and looked back through
> the last few weeks' messages. The fonts still show fine for me (if a little
> mis-sized at times). Joe, how far back did you look to find messages that
> didn't show right? Have you got an example date I could check myself?
>
> Cheers
> Hugh B

From other lists I hear that the new look in yahoo is causing problems with
some languages. We are not alone.

I've used StarOffice and Netscape as browsers and for emails in the past
and the choices were text or html or both for messages -- rtf only ever
worked as an attachment. It had other disadvantages: sometimes swelling to
enormous size and varying greatly according to the platform it was
generated on.

Before Unicode I managed to scan in and edit a text on linguistics with
accented letters and phonetic symbols that were from several code pages. I
got it all right in StarOffice, but not in Word. Then, when I corrected it
in Word, I found a few letters reverting when I opened it in StarOffice.
rtf was not an option because the original contained some small capitals,
superscripts and curved quotes. These were the first to go when I
converted to html. I'm still uncertain about them in Unicode; should I use
superscripted numerals or take the raised numerals available in Unicode?
(I've had texts to translate that contained superscript lower case o for
the temperature degree sign and raised digit 1 for all apostrophes -- very
confusing.)

Some CAT tools for translators let you export in pretty robust 2-column
html formats. They have to be, with Latin on one side and Greek on the
other, or Cyrillic and Arabic. It's worth accessing web pages in other
languages to see what your browser can handle. I found a free html
translator called Cat's Cradle and used it in combination with Netscape to
translate a text into Shavian, but I had to work from a copy of the
original that I kept open and separate, while the Netscape Composer window
showed only ghoti. Using BeOS it is possible to switch keyboards and fonts
on the fly. But these are non-Unicode workabouts.

Dunno about parsing the group archive. It should be easy enough to convert
abc to PEEP BIB & TOT or the keyboard mappings, as long as they don't mean
abc or even alpha, beta and gamma. I knocked up a Forth program to do it
for Cyrillic on my old Amstrad, then using a dtp program to print out Latin
and Cyrillic. It would have to be 16-bit Unicode though. Could it be
converted by Unitype/Global Writer? I have two copies, but with a
different selection of languages. This is going to take time, and I think
I've been here before. And there's a new Unicode to upgrade to!
jb

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That's what we need, a QE II Golden Jubilee (a little late) Androcles and the
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Bob Richmond
Knoxville, Tennessee USA

All right, time for a stupid question,
and someone foolish enough to ask it.

What exactly is Unicode Shavian?

For that matter, what is Unicode?

I use Mac OS X with its browser Safari,
which includes under text encoding many
choices, including "Unicode (UTF 8)"

There is also under "Special Characters" a
Character Palette which also offers a choice,
one of which is Unicode, which in turn lists
Shavian as an option. Yet when this is selected
nothing is there, only empty rectangles where
there should be letters.

If this is too basic a question for anyone to
bother answering, please just indicate where
I might go to find enlightenment (or at least
consolation).

On behalf of the cyber-challenged members
of this group (of which I may be the only one),
I thank you.

dshep