Re: Arabisation and character sets

Francois Yergeau, yergeau@alis.com said on 4/1/98 7:12 PM:

>>Again it seems that IE is a little more "democratic" than Netscape: at
>>least it recognizes the Content-type tag, so it does not force us to use
>>the MS code page 1256...
>
>Don't be too hard on them!  Netscape does recognize the Content-Type, it's
>just that they don't support Arabic or Hebrew charsets at all.  For these
>character sets, Netscape depends totally on platform capabilities, and this
>is very insufficient, not only in terms of charsets.  I've already
>mentionned word order when a line consists of more than one element.  Bidi
>scripts require support in the application, not only from the OS.  Tango
>provides that, MSIE-Arabic too, we have been told, but not Netscape.  Too 
>bad.

The process of development for Netscape seems to be more open now with 
the first release of Netscape 5 source code. In fact, if anyone wants to 
put forth effort to improve (or criticize) Netscape's foreign character 
abilities they have the opportunity to do so: http://www.mozilla.org. 
There is also a "wish list" area for sending suggestions on how to 
improve the browser.

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Deke Smith
Tallent Communications Group, Brentwood TN
deke@tallent.com, 615-661-9878
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Received on Thursday, 2 April 1998 09:12:29 UTC