Re: Major site in unicode?

From: Elaine Keown (keown@altavista.com)
Date: Sat Sep 30 2000 - 10:37:55 EDT


Dear Mr. Zeigler and List:

Possible leads on finding "major site in Unicode": AT&T may have started using an early Unicode-compatible browser on its sites a couple years ago. See the URL:
http://www.att.nl/press/0896/960815.bsa.html, a press release.

AT&T was scheduled to use a browser by Accent Software, Multilingual Mosaic, which has been Unicode-compatible for several years. Accent Software is in Jerusalem, may now possibly be
found at www.agentsoft.com, their Web products subsidiary. Write them to find out who else is using their browser products.

In addition, a Canadian (Quebecois?) company named Alis Technologies has had a Unicode-competible browser and several other products for a couple years. Theirs is called "Tango", supports 90 languages, and their Web site is www.alis.com. They would probably have leads for you too.

This is not what you asked, but there is some movement in Biblical Studies toward Unicode now, they are planning some important sites using Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic, a very exciting development. Unicode 3.0 added some versions of Hebrew characters widely used in diaspora Hebrew teaching and research.

Elaine Keown

On Sat, 30 September 2000, George Zeigler wrote:

> Hello,
> Anyone know of a major site out there that uses only unicode. Actually, any
> decent business site.
 
> My firm is attempting to build a major portal linked to other sites in 10 to
> 30 languages depending on the particular site. We had seriously considered
> using unicode as the one character set. But upon closer
> examination, it seemed that this would hurt us market wise. Unicode does not
> seem to be making inroads on the internet. No major site is using unicde or
> minor sites for that matter. At least that I know of.
>
> Russians are used to cp1251 and koi-8. I work in Russia, and our
> programmers were quite adimit, that if a site was only in Unicode, they would
> not use it. No Chinese sites are using unicode. Couldn't find any in Japanese
> or Korean either. European sites are using the ISO standard.
>
> Then there was the problem with browsers. I can't remember if it was
> netscape or explorer, but the font True Type was automatically chosen if
> Unicode was chosen. Chinese hyroglyphs show poorly in TrueType. They have
> their own fonts.
>
> Unicode seems useful only for those working with ancient or
> non-major languages or for those working with multiple languages in the same
> spreadsheet/document.
>
> Thanks
> George

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