Re: format nego in HTML/10646?

Terry Allen (terry@ora.com)
Sat, 6 May 95 19:12:26 EDT

| >For example, the point of format negotiation is that clients
| >get info in formats they can handle, either by advertising what
| >they accept to servers or by some more complicated means. If
| >10646 is to be made the HTML document charset, and the MIME (right?)
| >charset param is to specify some encoding of 10646, how will a server
| >determine whether my client can render a given HTML doc?
|
| I think you still haven't grasped the concept that
| Accept-Charset: ISO-2022-JP
| Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1
| can still be used to indicate encoding, even though the document
| character set be ISO 10646.

I thought I grasped that just fine.

Encoding is one thing, glyphs are another. I need glyphs to render.
If I can encode Hindi in the document charset 10646 using iso-2022-jp,
which I have been led to believe I can do, how does this format
negotiation work? or will any encoding of any 10646 content
using iso-2022-jp be limited somehow to the Japanese portion
(if there is such a concept) of 10646?

Charsets smaller than Unicode have, mostly, natural relations to
languages and to fonts. For those charsets one could infer from the
charset parameter what fonts might be needed.

Unicode is a different story. If the
document charset of HTML is to be Unicode, then anyone can hand
me a valid, conforming HTML doc that has characters in it I won't
be able to render unless I have a full set of glyphs for all
65,500+ characters. Most of us won't. How do we manage that
practically? How do I determine, without parsing the doc, what
range of 10646 it uses? or do I have to live with not being
able to do that? (I'm just exploring this issue, not taking a
side.)

-- 
Terry Allen  (terry@ora.com)   O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
Editor, Digital Media Group    101 Morris St.
			       Sebastopol, Calif., 95472
occasional column at:  http://gnn.com/meta/imedia/webworks/allen/


A Davenport Group sponsor.  For information on the Davenport 
  Group see ftp://ftp.ora.com/pub/davenport/README.html
	or  http://www.ora.com/davenport/README.html