Re: Unicode browsers (was: Re: Comments on: "Character Set" Considered Harmful)

Gavin Nicol (gtn@ebt.com)
Fri, 28 Apr 95 03:51:19 EDT

>>>But this is implementation detail, and should be of secondary importance
>>>in defining our direction. Web content requirements are what should
>>>be of primary importance.
>>
>>Quite.
>
>I've just tried to point out that the implementation issues are not as
>straightforward as you might think.

Well, I've experience in using Unicode and not using Unicode, so
I think I have a fair idea of the tradeoffs etc. though every system
*is* different...

>Let's put aside these implementation issues for now. They are
>important, but I think the labelling issue is more important issue for
>us to grapple with now.

I agree. The labelling issue is the last major hole in the
infrastructure. The HTML-on-CDROM problem was one I'd only though
vaguely thought about, possibly because I think there are better
solutions for that media...

Anyway, for internationalisation, I think we need to proceed along
these lines:

1) Get the editorial changes, and SGML changes into the HTML
spec. so that ISO/IEC 10646 is recognised as the document
character set.
2) Solve the labelling problem (or at the very least, offer
guidelines).
3) Start adding support for locale-independent data representations
for measurements etc.
4) Improve browser implementations.