Re: UTF-8 in web pages

From: Chris Wendt (christw@microsoft.com)
Date: Mon Feb 08 1999 - 12:28:06 EST


> BTW Chris Wendt can comment, but I believe that IE also uses the lang
> attribute to pick a suitable font, if one is available.

Correct. It does so for Han-disambiguation. The recognized LANG attributes
are "zh-cn", "zh-tw", "ja", "ko". In non-Han cases Internet Explorer uses a
typeface that closely matches the current "active" typeface, which can be
either the browser default per script or document specified.

I would agree with Chris that today the majority of users have a system
capable of reading UTF-8 encoded HTML documents "out of the box".

> >Currently, the "popular" browsers out there associate fonts with
character
> >encodings, not languages.

If you consider Internet Explorer one of the "popular" browsers I can not
confirm this statement. The typeface is associated with a Unicode code
point. The document encoding only gives a hint for what the default typeface
should be.



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