- From: Franklen Choi <franklen@pacific.net.hk>
- Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2002 03:13:01 -0500 (EST)
- To: www-validator@w3.org
Dear all, I would like to make all the web-pages I create accessible to as many netizens as possible. However, although there are quite a number of tools that help web-designers to create interoperable Web page, I find that many of these tools are deficient when Asian Characters are concerned. Example 1: The support for double-byte characters by Amaya is still under construction Example 2: Tidy converts many Chinese characters, and even tags, of my documents into "?" (The option 'raw' is already selected). (While there is a binary executable version of the program which supports Asian characters, it is being in the state of 'unsupported'). This means I can hardly take the advantage of Tidy when many books and web-sites recommend it. Example 3: W3C HTML Validation service displays the above subject message most of the time when my documents are sent to it, when actually the characters of these documents can be displayed properly by many browsers I test against (e.g. lynx, opera, netscape, m$ ie, konqueror,...) I am not accusing anybody, but I just want to share my feelings that /it is very frustrating for an Asian user, who is committed to write accessible and standard-compliant web-pages, only find him/herself unsupported, and feel 'rejected'/. This reminds me a programmer, who was recently asked why his program cannot render unicode characters properly, replied: "Most computer programs use the ASCII standard to support languages that are using the Latin character set and are limited to representing alphabets with less than 256 characters. One byte is sufficient to represent a single character in such alphabets. More than one byte is required to represent a character in languages with more than 256 different characters or character variations. Since traditional computer languages used to write computer programs use a single byte to represent a single character, changing to a system that require more than one byte to represent a single character require major changes to the way programs are written and compiled. Currently ***** does not have native support for Unicode (for displaying characters that are not in the default Latin alphabet, such as non-ASCII characters requiring more than one byte). This may change in the future, however this is not guaranteed and a timeframe has not been established, given that adding native support of Unicode would require rewriting a large portion of the program. (...) " I really hope that internationalization is not something regarded as a luxury. best to all, Franklen K.S
Received on Thursday, 24 January 2002 03:25:14 UTC