Re: [w3c-wai-ig] <none>

> would expect that a computer/browser being used would have the fonts 
> needed by the people from that region (ie. a US cafe might have support 

In many places people using Computers use English.  It wouldn't surprise
me if there is more interest in providing content in Indian scripts in
the UK rather than India.

Also, traditionally, where local scripts are used, they have been
achieved by misrepresenting fonts with 8 bit encodings, rather than
by proper Unicode mapping.  There may well still be a lot of machines
operating in this mode, particularly with older browsers.  A lot of web
pages misrepresent their character set or fail to specify it.

> for Enlgish and Spanish while a Canadian library might have support for 
> English and French).

America has a lot more languages than that.  In the UK, the main interest
would be in languages from immigrant communities (there is a side issue that
those with computers are probably fluent in English, anyway).  However, I'd
be rather surprised, if pleasantly, if I found that the PCs in Ealing
Road Library in Wembley had Gujarati and Tamil fonts installed, in spite
of being in the centre of those communities in London.

Certainly one of my Chinese teachers said that the university where
she was studying didn't have Chinese support on their PCs; I suspect
that that university gets a lot of its revenue from overseas students.
Within the UK Chinese community as a whole, people are unlikely to have
Chinese fonts, and if they do, they are likely to be from a rather old
Chinese environment package, rather than those recently packaged with
operating systems, because that's how the grapevine about Chinese language
support works.  (Some of the older version of these packages actually
code up GB2312 characters as two numeric entities in the 128-255 range,
on the assumption that the font processing (from the same package) will
interpret them as a single character.  About a year ago, there was one
UK academic site that still had such pages; they may still have them.)

Received on Monday, 29 September 2003 17:08:14 UTC