On 25/07/05, Nikola Smolenski <smolensk(a)eunet.yu> wrote:
The way I see it, this decision is a political and not
a technical one. Each
word could have several spellings, each of which is related to a spelling
authority. If you want common misspellings in the dictionary, simply have
"Common misspelling" as a spelling authority. Similarly, nothing prevents you
from having several different spellings of a same word attributed to a single
spelling authority, which solves all the problems you mentioned above.
Surely it would be better for the search function to try some other
possibilities, such as removing glottal stops from the input and
searching again.
Besides, didn't we forget the Unicode possibility of the same
character entered in two ways?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_equivalence
Actually, ideally every word would have a "search name" which is
worked out based on the language. It would only contain the compulsory
characters, with a certain decision on e.g. German ä ö ü (to transform
them in one direction or the other). It could also decompose all
precomposed characters into sets of characters. This is a little bit
like how some databases store the soundex index.
I think this would handle most cases. I certainly agree that redirects
are a necessary technical feature for the rarer cases.