Re: Charsets: Problem statement/requirements?

Bob Jung (bobj@netscape.com)
Wed, 8 Feb 95 22:39:09 EST

At 6:44 PM 2/8/95 -0500, Daniel W. Connolly wrote:
>...
>** What happens with existing clients?
> (Mosaic 2.4 will fail to recognize it as text/html at all,
> and put to "save to file" dialog. This is reasonable/reliable
> behavior, in my book)
>
>** What should future clients do?
> I can't read russian. Most of the planet can't read russian.
> I won't pay extra for a client that deals with russian.
> It's not cost-effective to require the whole world to support
> russian character sets.
>
> If I were an engineer at NetScape, for example, I'd cringe at
> the thought of required suport for Russian fonts.
>...

Speaking as an engineer at Netscape...

Netscape will rely upon the system (e.g., Mac, Windows, X) to provide the
fonts. Netscape only needs to convert from 8859-5 (or KOI8 or KOI7 or
whatever is specified in the MIME charset parameter) to the encoding used by
the browser's Cyrillic font.

Once I have a basic architecture to convert from Latin1-to-MacRoman,
it's simple to add Latin5-to-MacCyrillic.

Cyrillic is not on the top of my priority list, but I can very easily support
it in the future as long as the base system does. Mac, Windows and X do
support Cyrillic.

signed,
not cringing :-)

Bob Jung bobj@netscape.com +1 415 528-2688, fax +1 415 528-4122
Netscape Communications Corp. 501 E. Middlefield Mtn View, CA 94041