Re: LYNX-DEV Re: showing FRENCH in PURE ASCII

[David Combs]

There is this site written in French I look at sometimes.

Trouble is, French has accents: acute accents, and grave accents
(ie back-quotes).

Now, for me at least, one of the GOOD things about lynx is that
I deal with only ASCII files -- easy to egrep, insert into 
ordinary text-files, etc.

Here's my idea:

Since here is no way in plain ASCII to actually SHOW an accented
character, maybe we just map the concept "accented (whether acute
OR grave)" to "uppercase".

Maybe anything ACTUALLY uppercase can map to "underlined" -- so
we don't lose that information (maybe underlined with eg "="?)

Anyway, it's pretty much obvious for an accented character, which
KIND of accent is (ie, the person reading it can figure it out
himself), maybe much info isn't lost by mapping the two types
onto the same effect (uppercase).

An alternative would be to prefix or suffix the accented characater
with the accent of the right type -- but it would be HORRIBLE to
read.  I think the upperCase-idea makes for more readible text.

Like I say, I'd like to stay away from fancy fonts, etc, -- I'm
so old fashioned that I actually PREFER plain ASCII.  (If I want
fancy fonts, I guess I go use netscrape? -- in my mind, that's
NOT what LYNX is for!)

----

Now, the HTML that these french use at this site has things
like (for say the new verb "fooer" that maybe inflects to
"fooE" (foo<accentE>)):  address@hidden; (that sequence of chars
in the html),

  where it looks like one could merely REDEFINE "eacute" to
generate an upper-case E.  Maybe there could be a runtime-settable
option to turn that on.

I don't know html -- is this "&eacute" stuff STANDARD in html?
If so, then ALL sites would be using it, and we could just
redefine it "implicitly" within lynx, as option.

----

Likewise for Spanish.  A tilde-N could be shown uppercase-N.

----

Maybe this wouldn't work for Farsi or Chinese, but for some of our
Western languages, it looks like a solution that retains ASCII!,
good old wonderful flexible useable ASCII.
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