Re: charset issues

To:     www_international@w3.org
 
 Subject:      charset issues

J.Larmouth @ ITI.SALFORD.AC.UK  wrote:

> ....  We really only want ONE de facto standard,  not even
> two,  and UTF-8 scores on most criteria.
>.......  But delivery should be in a "sensible" charset.
> 
> >(3) All the special variants, alternative designations, and garbage
> >        "charset" parameters.
> >
> >To help keep the net clean of an uncontrolled proliferation of
> >encodings, things in the last category definitely should not
> >be sent in Accept-Charset.
>
> >So in practice, I could see the following solutions for
> >Accept-Charset:
> 
> >- Send UTF-8 if you can accept it, and nothing else.
> 
> Yes.  And then the browser worries about the font problems.
> 
> John L

        Yes. Yes. If I understand this suggestion
        (and please explain it to me gently if I do not) 
        browser could handle charsets as follows:

 
   Browser would not treat charsets as static:
      "You pick one, you are stuck with it".
 
  Lets consider the following  example  problem:
 
 Say, I want to have a text which will contain  the following fragment
on one line:
----------------------------------------------------------
      .. The German word ko"se becomes froma`ge  in French,  but  sy'r
in Czech yet ... in  ....
---------------------------------------------------------------------



    With current system of static character sets I would need a charset
which combines all
 Latin-1 and Latin-2 and ...
 
  But, if you reserve ONE special character or tag or even just an
attribute for this, I can write this one line  like this:
 
--------------------------------------
       .. The German word <font charset=German > ko"se </font> becomes
<font charset=French> froma`ge </font>
         but <font charset=CZ > sy'r </font> ...
-----------------------------------------------------


 
  ,where the default charset is  always ASCII, and I can switch
     to any other charset whenever I want to.
 
 If the browser supports charset chosen in a tag,
    it will render the mnemonic ASCII bigrams 
   ( o", y', s^, ..) in that set, e.g
.
 
 o"  as  o with umlaut for German, and
 a`  as a with accent for French, or
 y' with proper image of y with diacritics for Czech etc
 
   which is na improvement over the current system when I often get
something unreadable (this is the fail-safe feature)
e)
...
...
 
   I could elaborate - if this is too telegraphic --
    as long as this  makes some sense to someone else. too..

  Would this require that the draft:
  ftp://ftp.isi.edu/internet-drafts/draft-freed-charset-reg-01.txt
  has to be ammended?

 
   p.mikes@ieee.org  (Peter Mikes)

Received on Friday, 6 December 1996 19:37:44 UTC