Re: Multilingual Documents [was: HTML forms and UTF-8]

From: Martin Heijdra (mheijdra@princeton.edu)
Date: Mon Nov 22 1999 - 15:19:07 EST


Actually, the fact that most texts are primarily in one language AND the need
for multilingual capability are not necessarily in opposition. The vast
majority of documents I want to put on the Web are *written* in one language
(mainly, English) BUT with small parts (titles etc.) in other script systems,
namely the various parts of CJK. Currently we still constantly have to use
gifs etc. to get the characters and all different diacritics right, because of
the limitation of one encoding per page. Only when a reasonably full Unicode
capability and/or font can safely be assumed to be present (rather than some
having Chinese, some having Japanese, some having pan-European, some having
that) will the need for such awful gif and picture-solution for texts go away.

Becker, Joseph wrote:
>
> What Chris says matches the results of market studies we (Xerox) did on
> multilingual systems. It is globalization and connectivity that create the
> value of one-world architecture; multilingual documents are a pleasant bonus
> for those of us who need or enjoy them.
>
> Joe

-- 
Martin Heijdra
Gest Oriental Library
317 Palmer Hall
Princeton, NJ 08544



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