Re: Supporting EOT-Lite

Also sprach Christopher  Fynn:

 > Just now I'm visiting Siliguri, the largest city in northern West
 > Bengal which is the transport and trading hub for NE India. I've
 > popped into some different Internet Cafes here which are mostly
 > franchises of (Indian) national chains. They are *all* using
 > Windows 2000 or Windows XP and IE 6.
 > 
 > IE6 because it supports embedded EOT fonts used on many Indian
 > Language websites. Many of these Internet cafes say they would be
 > would be using Firefox but it doesn't work with these sites. I
 > found onlt one independent Internet Cafe using Firefox - and nobody
 > using IE 7 or 8.
 >
 > I think *this* is a good illustration of the reason to support EOT Lite.   

Opera researched this issue in 2008. Here's what two of our Indian
employees wrote at that time:

 | Yes, Indian regional sites, especially news sites and religious sites, do  
 | use EOT. Ive contacted some of them, and a many of those have now recently  
 | changed and switched to UTF, but still a quite a few regional sites remain  
 | which still use EOT.
 | 
 | Just a quick example, amarujala.com, eenadu.net, iift.edu/hindisite/ ,
 | 
 | Having said that, Indian sites are changing it seems, and the use of EOT  
 | seems to be on the decline here.

And:

 | This was a problem with a large number of Hindi websites when I checked  
 | last year but it does not seem to be a problem today. I checked a  
 | directory of Hindi websites http://dir.hinkhoj.com/ and most of them don't  
 | use EOT any longer. The only major news site using EOT on the list right  
 | now is http://www.amarujala.com/today/default.asp
 | 
 | But I've only checked Hindi websites not sure about other regional  
 | languages in India.

So, I wouldn't conclude that the use of IE is due to EOT.

 > There are millions of users in developing countries whose access to
 > the internet is limited to systems like these. Embedded fonts are
 > particularly important for non-Roman scripts - and in these
 > countries systems running old versions of Windows and IE are going
 > be the norm for years to come.

At Opera we see a different picture. We're seeing the use of the
mobile web grow rapidly in places where you perhaps wouldn't expect
it. Here's the top five countries for Opera Mini usage in January
2009:

  1 Russia
  2 Indonesia
  3 Ukraine
  4 China
  5 India

Needless to say, Opera Mini doesn't support EOT.

Cheers,

-h&kon
              Håkon Wium Lie                          CTO °þe®ª
howcome@opera.com                  http://people.opera.com/howcome

Received on Saturday, 1 August 2009 12:33:39 UTC