lynx-dev RE: UTF-8 in web pages (fwd)

[dickey]

Forwarded message:
> From address@hidden Mon Feb  8 03:11:56 1999
> Message-Id: <address@hidden> 
> Errors-To: address@hidden 
> X-Uml-Sequence: 7217 (1999-02-08 07:37:17 GMT) 
> From: Chris Pratley <address@hidden> 
> To: Unicode List <address@hidden> 
> Date: Sun, 7 Feb 1999 23:37:16 -0800 (PST) 
> Subject: RE: UTF-8 in web pages 
>  
> 
> >>And most do not come configured for UTF-8 out of the box, which is the 
> real 
> >>show-stopper now for more widespread use of that charset. 
>  
> Actually, if you measure by number of users, I think UTF-8 capable browsers 
> are easily over 50% now. UTF-8 works well in Internet Explorer 4.01 and 
> higher, and from what I can tell it seems to function in Navigator 4.03 and 
> higher. Together, current research shows that those two (and later versions 
> of them) plus other browsers based on IE technologies (and Tango) account 
> for somewhere around 75% of the installed user base. So, we're making 
> progress. (Note that things work much better in these browsers if you label 
> the file as UTF-8 using the META tag). 
>  
> That said, you can maintain reasonable backward compatibility by using 
> legacy encodings (e.g. Shift-JIS) that support the majority of your page's 
> content, plus Unicode NCRs for the remainder. That way your content is as 
> visible as it can be, and the same browsers that support UTF-8 (roughly) 
> support Unicode NCRs. The only drawback is that the size of your file may 
> slightly increase. UTF-8 cleaner and easier though, so the sooner we can all 
> move to that, the better. 
>  
> BTW Chris Wendt can comment, but I believe that IE also uses the lang 
> attribute to pick a suitable font, if one is available. 
>  
> -----Original Message----- 
> From: Francois Yergeau [mailto:address@hidden 
> Sent: Sunday, February 07, 1999 10:00 AM 
> To: Unicode List 
> Subject: RE: UTF-8 in web pages 
>  
> À 21:18 06/02/99 -0800, Adrian Havill a écrit : 
> >but are 
> >there any browsers out there that plan to implement this (choosing a font 
> >appropriate for a particular language based on the lang attribute)? 
>  
> Tango has been doing for a couple of years.  It has a notion of a 
> preferential font, that is dynamically influenced by both the charset of 
> the page and the lang attribute.  Characters are looked up first in that 
> font, then in all the others in order of their declaration in a 
> configuration file. 
>  
> But the absence of such a feature is no reason not to use UTF-8 vs, say, 
> Shift_JIS.  If you pick Shift_JIS, you're restricted to Japanese 
> characters, which will be displayed correctly.  If you choose UTF-8, you 
> can still have all Japanese chracaters display correctly, but you can also 
> get other characters to display if you have a larger font or if your 
> browser knows how to use multiple fonts (like Tango). 
>  
>  
> >Currently, the "popular" browsers out there associate fonts with character 
> >encodings, not languages. 
>  
> And most do not come configured for UTF-8 out of the box, which is the real 
> show-stopper now for more widespread use of that charset. 
>  
>  
> -- 
> François Yergeau 


-- 
Thomas E. Dickey
address@hidden
http://www.clark.net/pub/dickey