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Re: Technical inquiries to Arabeyes outsiders,



Hey,

Nadim Shaikli a *crit :

> Twitching or no twitching, I will NOT second guess my actions or
> intuitions to make others happy or "comfortable".

This is not about being confortable as much as giving ourselves the
*necessary* weight and prestige to reach one of our goals: be standard makers.
Being standard makers means among others respecting ourselves and thinking
that our knowledge and opinion is no less valid or worth than even Unicode's
or W3C's (they're not Gods, and their speciality is not arabization, so when
it comes to Arabization, we can, and we definitely do sometimes, know more
than they do). In fact, Unicode folks have made a lot of English centric stuff
that is far from being the best way to do it if they kept in account that
Arabic or Chinese (I've seen a lot of *good* computer scientists from China
complain too) are languages that are spoken by other human beings. This is
only an example to show that we know our job (Arabization is our job here)
better than ANYONE else around.

>  I wanted to
> get someone's attention since that someone has spent years on
> the W3C, Mozilla, Unicode, etc forums and has had a great deal
> of history regarding this topic (and is VERY knowledge on the
> subject or can at least point one in the right direction).

You overrate Roozbeh's knowledge then. This is not about her btw, I've been
years into this as well, but though I didn't participate in forums, I've
definitely seen her and many other good folks say gross mistakes (her last
answer is an example of this... but it happens to everyone, including me, so
what I'm saying is not about Roozbeh as much as about such personal inquiries
presupposing any authorities). The point is, refering to a vert failible
programmer as some superior authority is precisely what makes us a laughing
stock if we want to have the pretension to be taken seriously as THE authority
in Arabization. Mind you, it is as if *we* in Arabization didn't really have
those years of experience as well. It seems to me here that this remarks
simply means that our work on Arabeyes' esteem and trust in capabilities
should start with our own core team:/

> It didn't make me twitch when Mohammed mailed QT asking them this
> question (did it YOU ???) or while getting Xfree's opinion about
> things, but it made you'all twitch when I CC'ed someone.

Ok wait. I don't remember the QT episode. I remember the XFree86 episode, and
the thing is different. First, it was presented as if we knew our field
(Arabization) and we were asking for something about something that was not
our job (XFree86 internals) to a general list in order to reach a very defined
goal we knew precisely (that they include basic Arabic "glyphing" in a basic
install), giving them the choice on how to do it. This is very different from
asking one given person over how *we* should do our work, giving her the
prestige of knowledge and authority over our own. You see the nuance?

> Let's stick to the technical issues, OK ?

I am not an executant programmer and didn't want to work for the W3C or
Unicode who have done quite some brain damaged stuff before. I am investing my
efforts in Arabeyes and there is a little bit more than simple execution of
technical issues at stake. This is a project that requires definitions, and
finding solutions to (yes technical) problems. But since we have the
pretension of making these solutions standard ones because we think we can do
better than people whose job is not Arabization, we have to maintain some
communication policy as well. Otherwise, it's like Microsoft saying that
selling windows solely meant defining the Win32 API (and pray God that people
will come and ask for it).

> This is getting REALLY REALLY silly.

I'm wondering if this warrants an answer, so I'll just let you think ponder
over it.

> If I've become a such thorn in everyone's side, PLEASE let me know...

It was not personal, and I don't want it to be. There is an important point
that touches the projects goals and success here, so you might want to reread
it instead of falling back to insults or simply dismiss it as silly.