Re: ISO/IEC 10646 as Document Character Set

Alex Hopmann (hopmann@holonet.net)
Fri, 5 May 95 17:25:37 EDT

Dan Connolly says:
>Yes, it will: If I put &#2789 (or whatever) all over my documents, and
>the HTML 2.0 spec specifies that this document is legal, and yet it
>doesn't work on 95% of the browsers in existence, then we
>lose. Granted, there are corner cases of documents where this is the
>case currently, but not on anything as substantive as this.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but even if a given browser supports ISO10646, when
it encounters the entity ૥ it isn't necessarily even going to have a
font that is able to display the correct character. BUT, people who are
making browsers that are internationalized for languages for which ૥
is important, will make sure that its displayed.

As far as I see it there are two possible routes we can take:

1) HTML 2.0 uses Latin-1. We maybe say we intend to support 10646 in the
future. A reference to ૥ gets rounded to 8 bits like Glenn found from
experience. People doing international browsers will probably go ahead and
support 10646 (as well as the mixed bag of other formats) because its what
they have to do to provide an international product that works some of the time.

2) HTML 2.0 uses 10646. We say that minimally complient browsers must only
support the first 256 positions, or in other words Latin-1. A reference to
૥ gets rounded to 8 bits like Glenn found from experience. People
doing international browsers will probably go ahead and support 10646 (as
well as the mixed bag of other formats) because its what they have to do to
provide an international product that works some of the time.

I am fairly new to these internationalization issues, so its quite possible
that my analysis above is wrong. But it seems we are left with conflicting
desires to document "EXACTELLY" what is supported today, vs. make good
progress towards better international support. I would also suggest that if
Glenn's report on his experiences with Netscape, Mosaic, and OmniWeb is
correct that it could be described as existing practice by either of the two
paragraphs above.

Sorry I don't have any specific language I'm in favor of, just my 2
favorite-unit-of-small-change-in-your-local-currency.

Alex Hopmann
ResNova Software, Inc.
hopmann@holonet.net