Re: Making pt a non-physical unit

2010/1/7 Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+w3c@gmail.com>:
> On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 2:47 PM, Ambrose LI <ambrose.li@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Have you EVER written any web pages that talk about or use foreign
>> languages where the text is simply not representable unless you throw
>> in an image? How can you say "I as user would rather there be no such
>> thing as images as text"? Of course no one wants that, but there ARE
>> instances where this is the only solution (or only practical solution,
>> since a lot of rare Unicode characters are not displayable even on the
>> latest Windows or Mac systems).
>
> Is this really still a practical issue?  There are several hundred
> Wikipedias covering some remarkably obscure languages, and none of
> them have asked to resort to images for their fonts that I know of.
> The most I've ever heard is that some want to use web fonts, but
> that's actually fairly practical these days (easier than images,
> anyway).

Yes, it is a practical issue. Please don't assume a use case is
invalid if you haven't run into it yourself.

It gets worse when you are talking about ancient scripts, because they
might not even have Unicode code points (that is, assuming you buy the
invalid assumption that something is displayable if it exists in the
Unicode code space).

I ran into this problem just a few months ago, after looking up dozens
of glyphs in the charts, not finding some glyphs, and then found that
I needed to change most of the others to images (with appropriate
alternate text, of course) after finding that they are not displayable
on most systems.

If you can split everything out to figures, of course it would not be
a practical issue because you can just float the images. But
somethings the glyphs must be kept inline and must display by default
at roughly the same size as the text.

-- 
cheers,
-ambrose

Received on Friday, 8 January 2010 00:10:24 UTC