Re: Sixteen Bit Fonts

On Sun, 18 Nov 2001, Martin Duerst wrote:

> Hello SherLok,
> 
> Moving to UTF-8 as the core encoding in the validator was
> very helpful to do decent internationalization. Before that,
> many actually correct pages (but e.g. in some Asian encodings)
> were labeled as invalid, and on the other side, many mistakes
> with character encodings went unnoticed.

	I think you're making it sound harder than it is. For English
output, there'd be no conversion to do. The browser can tell you that it
doesn't support UTF-8. So if you tell it that you're sending iso-8859-1
when you're sending UTF-8, then nobody will know otherwise.

> That we don't convert back from UTF-8 is part lazyness, and
> part an effort to move forward with internationalization.
> In the age of XML, a browser that doesn't support UTF-8 is
> quite a bit outdated. It's a pity that Lynx doesn't deal
> with UTF-8 yet; maybe you can do something about that.
> 
> [Please note that when supporting UTF-8, there is no need
> to display all characters. Displaying question marks or
> boxes for those characters than cannot be displayed is
> perfectly okay. Please also note that if you are working
> on some kind of Unix, there is terminal software that supports
> UTF-8.]

	I could use NetScape on this machine, but it's a very slow pig
when you only hav 8 meg of RAM. And it costs four times as much per year
to get the required PPP connection.

	I only recently told Lynx that ISO-8859-1 was okay, because I
found the required screen font. Before that, it was translating to the PC
character set. The reason I like Lynx is because the AIX system it runs
on has a 10Mbit/s transfer speed. My end is only 56kb/s, but since it
only has to show a screen of TEXT, that often works out fine. Changing
the fonts that Lynx accepts might be out of my hands.

Received on Wednesday, 21 November 2001 14:49:06 UTC