Re: Downloadable fonts and image replacement

> I'd like to mention the bad habit on many Indic websites, where pages in
* Bengali and Mayalayam (and some other) scripts are send to the browser as
* Latin-1 or as charset=x-user-defined, and the non-Unicode fonts needed

Unfortunately, as I hinted earlier in the thread, it wouldn't surprise
me if this is one of the main current uses of embedded web fonts!

The last time I looked, every Indic language on the web used this
techique, or pure text as images.

* to make this work are offered as a separately downloadable ttf or as
* eot with the @font-face styles. Demo: http://www.jugantor.com/demo/ .

This practice arose because native support for Indic scripts was very
late in browsers.  As it is the normal practice for most Indic languages
(it's just possible that Hindi is finally moving out of this, but, the
last time I looked, it wasn't), it's likely to take a long time to go
(the only good omen is that, with the exception of material produced
outside of the primary CJK geographical region, the use ASCII ISO 8859/1
entities for Chinese (using "Chinese environment" software, to convert
pairs of entities into Chinese characters) has more  or less died out,
and the only remaining problem is a common failure to identify the
character set actually used).

A lot of bad practices get established because their users are not
considered commercially important.

Received on Thursday, 27 April 2006 19:49:42 UTC