Re: A new iconography? (was:How to convince businesses to be accessible...

> From: Anne Pemberton <apembert@crosslink.net>

Chinese web pages use characters to the same extent as English web pages.
Text as graphics is used for the same sorts of reasons as in English
web pages.

In fact, lynx (the text only browser) is actively maintained in Japan
for use on Japanese web pages.

IE5 (and possibly) NS, support Chinese character fonts even on Windows
98 US versions, which don't provide general support for double byte
characters.  Just do a Windows update and download the fonts.  IE5
also supports Chinese text input into forms, at least on NT, and probably
on Win98.  If Chinese weren't implemented as characters, web forms would
be a serious problem in the CJK countries.  (I actually used this to
create the graphics of the characters for a raytraced Chinese new year 
greeting - not for work.)

The languages most likely to be forced to be graphics are those in
countries, particularly India, where the intelligentsia tend to speak
English, so there is no great incentive for US software companies to
support the popular language.  Even then, I know of a Telegu web page that
uses dynamic fonts to represent glyphs (it abuses them in the process,
but that's another story).  These languages are alphabetic, not iconic.

The next generation of browsers will have fonts that support even these
languages, but may not have the logic needed to do character to glyph
mapping properly.

Received on Monday, 16 October 2000 02:53:22 UTC