Markus Kuhn <Markus.Kuhn@cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> Chris Pratley wrote on 2000-03-24 11:12 UTC:
> > I'm curious why the makers of whatever [Unix] browsers these are
> > don't simply add support for non-ISO encodings like windows-1252
> > and be done with it.
>
> So far, X11, the commonly used Unix GUI system did support in its
> standard fonts only ISO 8859-1. We (= loose group of XFree86 volunteers)
> are changing this at the moment, but it will take at least a year or two
> until this is really widely deployed. (There are also some architectural
> issues, because the X11 font mechanisms were not designed to efficiently
> handle sparse 16-bit fonts that contain characters in the range 0-255
> plus one at 0x20AC). Most browsers do already offer transliteration to
> ASCII as a compromise fallback. CP1252 characters become slowly
> acceptable in the Unix world, too, *IF THEY ARE PROPERLY ANNOUNCED AND
> ENCODED*, i.e. either as UTF-8 (preferred), windows-1252, or Unicode
> numeric character references in HTML.
>
That's fine for browsers (except Lynx!). But most serious access to Unix
is text based -- that's why we like it: it has a shell, etc, that lets us
do what we want. Shells are accessed by terminals (including Xterm, which
follows ISO 2022). Terminals don't like character sets with graphics in C1.
So why should their use be encouraged in Unix?
And no, you can't announce CP1252 in the ISO 2022 environment because it
does not, and can't, have an ISO-2022 announcer.
- Frank
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