- From: by way of Judy Brewer <accessibility@javawoman.com>
- Date: Tue, 04 Feb 2003 01:04:10 -0500
- To: WAI Interest Group <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
At 05:57 2003-01-30, Charles McCathieNevile wrote: >The problem of diacritics is particularly pronounced in vietnamese where there are many possible combinations of them, and they change the meaning of words very significantly Because consonants are not very well distinguished in spoken vietnamese (the difference between Northern and Southern pronunciation of the same letter is clearer than the difference between different consonants in the same accent. When I visited Viet Nam in 1994, most business programs in use in Europe were firmly character-based. DOS still ruled on the desktop. And I was quite aware that with all the combined, often triple) diacriticals in Vietnamese it's not possible to write all "characters" with just 256 code positions. I was quite amazed to see many more computers in use than I'd have expected (such as in hotels and banks), all operating in "graphics mode" so all characters could be rendered correctly. Graphics-mode programming (not Windows, this was graphics-mode DOS!) was not easy and therefore quite costly at the time - and quite unusual in Europe: I was very impressed! -- Marjolein Katsma HomeSite Help - http://hshelp.com/ - Extensions, Tips and Tools The Bookstore - http://books.hshelp.com/ - Books for webmasters and webrookies
Received on Tuesday, 4 February 2003 01:04:01 UTC