Re: glyph selection for Unicode in browsers

On 09/27/2002 12:27:22 AM jameskass wrote:

>Don't despair.  As Peter Constable has pointed out, the infrastructure
>for having browsers support language tags is already present.

Actually, my point was specifically that *part* of the infrastructure is
already present, at least in OpenType, but not *all*, either in OpenType
(meaning of "language" in the OT spec needs to be clarified, and
relationships between these tags and the "language" tags used for data e.g.
RFC 3066, need to be resolved), or in APIs (there's no way for apps to
indicate which OT "language" tag to apply to a run unless the app wishes to
do *all* of the OT support -- replacing e.g. Uniscribe -- itself).


>Once the font specs for all this are set and fonts are released with
>the necessary coverage and the shaping engines can access all of this,
>the browsers are sure to quickly add support, too.

I'm not quite as optimistic in terms of how close we are to having all this
ready to go. I think there's some hard work still ahead.



- Peter


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Peter Constable

Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International
7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA
Tel: +1 972 708 7485
E-mail: <peter_constable@sil.org>

Received on Friday, 27 September 2002 10:02:31 UTC