- From: David Woolley <david.woolley@bts.co.uk>
- Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2000 23:08:46 +0100 (BST)
- To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
> 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