RE: WEFT help

From: Marco Cimarosti (marco.cimarosti@essetre.it)
Date: Mon Jul 01 2002 - 14:06:18 EDT


Arjun Aggarwal wrote:
> One such site on which the WEFT technology is used is
> http://dol.nic.in
> It is the site of the Department of Official Languages,
> Ministry of Home Affairs,India.
>
> I don't have to install any special font on any version of
> Windows to view this site. That is what needs to be tested.

The relevant fonts are embedded by the JavaScript program <hindifontsEN.js>,
called in the HEAD section.

This script does a bit of "browser sniffing", analyzing the property of
JavaScript's object <navigator> to determine which kind of browser the user
is using. If the browser is Netscape, it inserts a reference to font
<DVW-TTYogeshEN.pfr>; for all other browsers, it inserts a style sheet
referencing font <DVWTTYO02.eot>.

As far as I understand, the problem of this technique is that embedded fonts
such as <.pfr> or <.eot> do not support ISCII or Unicode, so the document
has to be in "font encoding".

Using this technique, it becomes impossible to copy & paste the text, search
in it, index it in search engines, etc. On the other hand, this approach
provides a seamless access to computers not yet having Unicode support...

IMHO, the technique could be improved a bit: <navigator> has a property
<platform> which can help determine whether the client operating system is
likely to have Unicode Indic support. This hint can be used to present the
user with alternate contents: a Unicode version for newer system and a
font-encoding version for older systems.

_ Marco



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