Re:gemini:// space
by danShumway on Monday February 01, 2021 @10:35AM
(#25989538)
- better client displays (allowing a user client to switch out fonts based on the language, for example)
- better support for users who are not multi-lingual (a client could try to auto-translate sections that are not in the user's native language)
- better search capabilities (find me all documents that contain a French passage)
- better voice-assistant support (if a document is being read out loud for any reason, it would be nice to be able to handle multiple languages well. This also combines with the auto-translate capabilities above.)
Basically, all of the reasons why Gemini includes a "lang" attribute in the first place, except recognizing that parsers and clients want to be able to make use of that on a section-by-section basis rather than purely at the document level.
Sometimes documents are big and expand across multiple languages. It's just a bad abstraction in general to assume that each document would only have one language type[0]. Documents/books in the real world don't work that way, and a document format that can't accurately represent a giant portion of classic literature isn't a very good general-purpose format.
[0]: yes, technically Gemini allows you to specify multiple top-level languages, but that's not useful for anything. If I'm parsing a document, I don't want it to tell me "hey, there's some French in here somewhere, good luck!" Tell me where it is.
- better support for users who are not multi-lingual (a client could try to auto-translate sections that are not in the user's native language)
- better search capabilities (find me all documents that contain a French passage)
- better voice-assistant support (if a document is being read out loud for any reason, it would be nice to be able to handle multiple languages well. This also combines with the auto-translate capabilities above.)
Basically, all of the reasons why Gemini includes a "lang" attribute in the first place, except recognizing that parsers and clients want to be able to make use of that on a section-by-section basis rather than purely at the document level.
Sometimes documents are big and expand across multiple languages. It's just a bad abstraction in general to assume that each document would only have one language type[0]. Documents/books in the real world don't work that way, and a document format that can't accurately represent a giant portion of classic literature isn't a very good general-purpose format.
[0]: yes, technically Gemini allows you to specify multiple top-level languages, but that's not useful for anything. If I'm parsing a document, I don't want it to tell me "hey, there's some French in here somewhere, good luck!" Tell me where it is.