Re: accented characters, etc.

John Delacour wrote:
> At 10:52 am +0000 2/12/99, Sean Healy wrote:
> >I'm new to the list, and I didn't see anything like this in the archives for the last few months, so here goes:
> >
> >The current list of accented letters available in HTML isn't nearly enough. [...]
>
> No such thing is needed; the big step towards internationalization is 
> already taken and it is Unicode <http:www.unicode.org/>.  All you need 
> to do is declare UTF-8 as your character set and use unicode entities 
> such as &x03EE; for your characters, bearing in mind that people using
> older system software and browsers will not be able to interpret them.

I was trying to point out that there is a big difference between simply
typing '&x03EE;' into a document and it showing up correctly as a 'Coptic
capital letter Dei' on one's screen (rather than a little '?'). 

Without OS and font support for the entire gamut of Unicode glyphs (say,
all of the Math symbols, Hiragana, Tibetan, Greek and Gurmukhi), one has
no assurance whatsoever that one's audience can see the intended characters,
and we're still a long way from having the technology than can do it over
the Web interoperably. For example, I know of no system available that 
can display the entire set of even the most common languages (say, even
the Latin languages, Arabic, Chinese and Cyrillic), much less Coptic. 

Murray

...........................................................................
Murray Altheim, SGML Grease Monkey         <mailto:altheim&#64;eng.sun.com>
Member of Technical Staff, Tools Development & Support
Sun Microsystems, 901 San Antonio Rd., UMPK17-102, Palo Alto, CA 94303-4900

   the honey bee is sad and cross and wicked as a weasel
   and when she perches on you boss she leaves a little measle -- archy

Received on Thursday, 2 December 1999 18:35:00 UTC