RE: Unicode Cyrillic GHE DE PE TE in Serbian

From: Martin J. Duerst (duerst@w3.org)
Date: Fri Jan 07 2000 - 01:21:16 EST


Hello Janko,

I have done some Russian in high school, and seen these variants,
and know what you speak about without an image. But for others,
maybe you can put the image somewhere on the web, and send a pointer
to this list.

At 05:15 00/01/05 -0800, Janko Stamenovic wrote:
>
> > Janko, how can you ask, in the *same* e-mail, that Serbian-Cyrillic and
> > Russian-Cyrillic are dis-unified (because some lowercase letters look
> > different in italic) *and* that the whole Cyrillic and Latin alphabets be
> > unified (because some letters look the same)?
>
> I just demonstrate to you that the REAL standard must take care of
> everything, not only parts of the issue. If we have to know about language
> tags, we either should have incorporated them in the code or made the
> code/standard good enough to take care of it.

There are REAL standards that do take care about this. In particular,
there are HTML, XML, and CSS. I hope you have heard about them :-).
For more info, please see http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/,
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/, http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml.

HTML allows you to indicate the language of a page, a paragraph,
or whatever piece of text by using the 'lang' attribute
[http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/dirlang.html#h-8.1].
In XML, the same is possible with the 'xml:lang' attribute
[http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#sec-lang-tag]. This is much more
widely used, and easier to use, than the 'Plane 14 language tags'
that have also been mentioned on this list.

This can then be used in CSS to set a font based on this attribute.
So as an example, you would have
   <em lang='sr'>PECTOPAH</em>
in your web page, and then a CSS rule such as
   em[lang=sr] { font-family: your-favorite-serbian-font, fallback }
in your stylesheet. Please see
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/selector.html#attribute-selectors and
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/fonts.html#font-family-prop for details.

The problem that remains may be to find an appropriate font.
Please bug the font vendors/suppliers about this, or choose one
that suits you from those discussed already.

Please try it out! For further comments and discussions regarding
Web Internationalization, please subscribe to www-international@w3.org
(by sending 'subscribe' to www-international-request@w3.org) and
write to that list.

Regards, Martin.

#-#-# Martin J. Du"rst, World Wide Web Consortium
#-#-# mailto:duerst@w3.org http://www.w3.org



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