Quo vadis?

duringtheromanempirealltextwaswrittenlikethiswithoutanypunctuationmark
spaceswhatsoeverwhybecauseonlyfewpeopleknewhowtoreadandtheywerereally
goodatittheyweretrainedalotandtheycouldeasilyreadtheonlyfewbooks
availablewithoutanyproblem[1]

Latin by the roadside

later on as the scholarship was opened and more and more people was able to learn how to read writers had to start thinking on how to create clues to the future reader so that (s)he would be able to read and pronounce their text as it should be they no longer could expect that a professional reader would be reading its text but maybe it would be a commoner who just happened to have had so much luck that (s)he was taught some reading 101[2]

Time flies! (phew!) and the more, and more, the scholarship and knowledge is spread around, “funny” characters are created – to make the reading easier. Obviously! The easier it is to read a text, the more, possible, readers that it will get the text!

GNOME

As we all, lucky ones of us, saw at the keynote ((The History of GNOME)) by Federico, Jonathan and David, GNOME early days where pretty much hacker-only enabled.

Luckily, the first spaces and sentence delimiters started to appear: the HIG, the early work on a11y, l10n, i18n, the teams that started to be created, the Foundation…

Fast forward to present we are jumping all over Unicode adding all missing punctuation marks on GNOME 3 to make it the best desktop experience that this thousands and thousands of new electronic device owners will need to feel in control of their devices.

I’m excited! And you know?! GNOME 3.6 is around the corner! Help out making the dots, dashes, spaces, parenthesis, quotation marks be fully integrated in our desktop to make it the most beautiful and easy to use desktop ever seen!

[1] During the Roman empire all text was written like this: without any punctuation mark, spaces, whatsoever! Why? Because only few people knew how to read, and they were really good at it. They were trained a lot and they could easily read the only few books available without any problem.

[2] No need to retype it right? ;)

3 pensaments quant a “Quo vadis?”

  1. The Thai writing system still uses scriptio continua. Spaces can be added, but they aren’t required and clustering rules make flowing text easy to visually separate. It’s also “superior” to English in many ways. If you can read a word, you can accurately pronounce it, without all the silly ambiguities and special cases as in English.

    Thai kids are still learning to read and write scriptio continua at ages from 4-5. Requiring spaces for non “professionals” seems totally bogus to me. Is that actually researched or just guessed?

  2. Ryan, that “non professionals” that I said was considering European medieval ages education, which was non existing for everyone but for the rich people, which could get personal teachers and so on.

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