Re: Encoding: Referring people to a list of labels

On 1/27/2014 3:20 AM, Henri Sivonen wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 27, 2014 at 11:35 AM, Andrew Cunningham
> <lang.support@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Until broswer developers CAN achieve that then it is irresponsible to
>> require web developers to always use UTF-8.
> If the character-to-glyph mapping of a writing system is trivial
> enough for it to be feasible to use @font-face and to commandeer e.g.
> the Latin-1 Supplement (whether encoded in UTF-8 or windows-1252) or
> to use the PUA (in UTF-8), then it is feasible to use the right code
> points with @font-face without the browser having special support for
> those code points (yes, even if the right code points are on astral
> planes).
>
Except that not all text is only displayed in browsers. Font and 
keyboard bindings to PUA are in principle possible, but in practice the 
"fake Latin-1" is, well, more "practical". Otherwise people would use 
PUA more often.

The reason a private use area exists in Unicode is sometimes assumed to 
be for purposes like these, but in reality, they only exist because East 
Asian character sets had them and Unicode wanted those to be fully 1:1 
convertible...

If we just accept that this is a usage pattern that just "is" and won't 
go away and that therefore 8-bit encodings exist (whether correctly 
declared or not), then we could get back to the topic of what level of 
support and documentation for non-UTF-8 is appropriate.

A./