Re: questions on webwml/english/templete/debian/cdimage.wml
Hi,
At Sun, 13 Jan 2002 13:14:30 +0100 (CET),
peter karlsson wrote:
> That depends on the browser and the available fonts. In my regular
> browser, I would see your name as it is supposed to (but I wouldn't
> understand it). It would be a good idea to (on the English version at
> least) to provide a transliteration of the name. On the same note, I
> would like to see Cyrillic transliterations of names on Russian pages,
> Greek transliterations of names on Greek pages, Hangul transliteration
> of names on Korean pages, etc., in addition to the original name
> representation.
It may or may not a good idea. This is because such transliterations
cannot be achieved by a simple algorithm. It will need human's labor.
I don't know this transliterations is worth paying such labor....
Yes, it may be nice but we have many more urgent jobs.
> > I agree this. However, this ideal can be realized _after_ all of us
> > will come to use UTF-8 locales.
>
> Why?
Because the algorithm transliterations is not very good. It is very
difficult to write webpage with consideration of "What will my words
become by transliterations". Writing ASCII is more reliable.
And, many people in the world have to use a small subset of softwares
only because such softwares support their native languages. Such
softwares may not support Unicode.
> I know. I am myself working at Opera Software, and we are working on
> the Unicode support in our browsers. Currently our Windows version
> works with most scripts that use left-to-write and are non-complex. The
> Linux version is still a bit behind (partly because of limitations to
> X), so I am aware of the problems. However, using pure UTF-8 is more
> likely to be displayed correctly in browsers than many of the legacy
> encodings, most certainly when mixing languages.
Oh, very good. Please note that east Asian will need not only display
support but also input support, i.e., XIM support. (I didn't test Opera
yet and I don't know whether Opera supports XIM or not. If it already
supports XIM, please forget this.)
Yes, in case of browsers and in case of mixture of languages, UTF-8
will work better than others (note there is a rival; ISO-2022 is a
multilingual encoding scheme with much longer history). However,
for _one_ language (most of Debian web pages are written in one
language, with a small portion of links to other languages), usage
of legacy encodings is better, because of plenty of supporting
softwares, fonts, and so on, so far. I am also wrestling with a
problem that Unicode doesn't have a relyable mapping table from/to
Japanese legacy encodings. (Without such table, I don't want to
convert my text files into Unicode.) See
http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/unicode-symbols.html for detail.
---
Tomohiro KUBOTA <kubota@debian.org>
http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/
"Introduction to I18N" http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/intro-i18n/
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