- From: L. David Baron <dbaron@dbaron.org>
- Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2003 22:55:04 -0700
- To: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>
- Cc: www-style@w3.org, w3c-i18n-ig@w3.org
On Monday 2003-10-20 19:52 +0300, Henri Sivonen wrote: > Then there's the practice of transferring Latin gibberish and applying > a font that is a Latin font from the system's point of view but > contains glyphs for another script. Although it's getting a little off-topic, it's worth noting that about half the bugs filed to request that Mozilla support dynamic fonts were filed because of such sites. Or, rather, sites that do something that's almost as bad -- claim to be encoded in charset=x-user-defined. This practice seems to be rather common for some South Asian languages. Examples of sites that do this (and the scripts they're in, or that I think they're in) are: http://www.eenadu.net/ Telugu http://www.lokmat.com/ Devanagari http://www.anandabazar.com/ Bengali http://www.loksatta.com/ Devanagari? http://www.rediff.com/hindi/ Devanagari? http://www.manoramaonline.com/ Malayalam > I think CSS 2.1 should not > accommodate fontifying Latin gibberish to look like text in a minority > script in browsers that happen to support such a trick. That approach > may appear to work (for some value of "work") in some cases but causes > problems with search engines and usually with browsers other than the > one the author of the page was using. I'm not sure how a browser could prevent it -- how could it detect that a font doesn't contain the characters it claims to contain? (Or did you mean something else by "CSS 2.1 should not accomodate..."?) And should charset=x-user-defined just be rejected, or should it be left for people who want to exchange documents containing characters that really aren't in Unicode? -David -- L. David Baron <URL: http://dbaron.org/ >
Received on Tuesday, 21 October 2003 01:55:08 UTC