Re: Downloadable fonts and image replacement

> is JPEG. Only the "lossy" half of the JPEG standard is used, not the
> "arithmetic coding" part. The unused part of JPEG is encumbered with

This is confusing.  As I understand it, arithmetic encoding is an
alternative to Huffman coding, which is also lossless.  The wording
above seems to suggest that the whole encoding is lossless when using
arithmetic encoding.  I believe there is a lossless JPEG standard, but
the use of arithmetic encoding is either completely orthogonal or 
coincidental. (On further research, it peforms worse than PNG and is
effectively dead.)

> Yes, certainly it should be allowed. For example, HTTP is agnostic
> wrt. character encodings. It does not favor UTF-8 or Unicode, and this

HTTP requires that requests and headers be sent in ASCII, and, except for
being overridden by the HTML specification (which says that character
set not be allowed to default) requires that ISO 8859/1 be the default
character set for HTML.

>  > As the discussion on this topic points out, many of the problems we
>  > have today are there because the initial support for Unicode was
>  > inadequate.

This was a fault with the HTML specification, which specified that the
character set should be limited ISO 8859/1 (although alternative
character sets could be used for transmission, only the intersection with
the HTML subset of ISO 8859/1 could be used in valid HTML.  In practice,
though, vendors actually implemented "the current platform's default code
page", so Windows-1252 became the de facto standard HTML character wet
in the Western world, even though the result was actually invalid HTML.

Received on Monday, 1 May 2006 21:43:44 UTC