RE: UTF-8 in web pages

From: Francois Yergeau (yergeau@alis.com)
Date: Sun Feb 07 1999 - 12:59:24 EST


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



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