>Perhaps a smart server could serve the fonts too: it could have
>"Accept-charset" for the character sets and encodings it will handle, and
>"Display-charset" for the character sets it can display. The smart server
>would figure out what is needed. Alternatively, it could be done on an
>exception basis: if a client can't display a character, it sends a
>request somewhere to a font-server (back to the WWW server?): this may be
>slow, but this is handling exceptions not normal operation.
This is certainly possible, and after a certain amount of time, good
caching clients will build up a "working set" of glyphs. In the Plan 9
documentation, they mention that this working set is generally not
large.
Of course, once free Unicode fonts become available, this will not be
needed (except in cases where we specifically want to use different
glyph images).