Re: Sick HTML

From: Antoine Leca (Antoine.Leca@renault.fr)
Date: Tue Apr 25 2000 - 07:00:49 EDT


Marco.Cimarosti@icl.com wrote:
>
> This is all great, and there is reasonable hope that these open technologies
> will soon bring Unicode on every desktop. But, right now, you cannot ask
> that the average HTML author suddenly becomes a skilled programmer *and*
> font designer *and* i18n specialist.

The current state of affair (April 2000) is that s/he should.
I concur this is unfortunate.

 
> > > - links to *free or very cheap* authoring tools to write
> > HTML pages in Indic
> > > scripts.
> > You can write HTML pages with UTF-8 characters using almost
> > any text editor.

Better use a UTF-8 able editor.
Or, depending of your needs, a not-free utf8-enabled HTML authoring tool.

> > BTW why does everything have to be *free or very cheap*? -
>
> Everything that the end user has to download must be free, for obvious
> commercial reasons.

Correct.

> Would you imagine the webmaster of the Telugu on-line
> newspaper above telling his readers: "Notice: starting from tomorrow we will
> finally switch to Unicode. So, if you still want your news, please go out
> and buy the following list of software products, for a total of US$ 500"!?

So the Telugu newspaper editor will pay the licence fee to a font designer,
that will design a Unicode-enabled Telugu font for him.

What or where is the difference with today's situation where no standard
for Telugu fonts exist, so every newspaper asks to download his own font?
the editor have paid the licence for the ad-hoc font, haven't he?
Furthermore, since Unicode will smooth the production process by using
standard tools instead of special composition ones, the price may end up
lower for the editor...

 
> But, about authoring tools, maybe I have been a little bit utopist, and you
> have a good part of reason. I was thinking at small independent web authors
> that cannot afford spending big amounts.

Do not worry for them: in a few years, if Unicode takes precedence for these
scripts, it will be easy to find easy-to-use authoring tools that will
combine utf8 *and* (underlying) Indic rendering, done by enthousiasts.

Also, Word 2000 is definitively going to spread, and deturning it from its
office use to self use is IMHO pretty current (if your licence does not
allow it, please do not do it).

The real question is, will the rocket just take off?

Antoine



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