mrasool@sancharnet.in wrote:
> One such site on which the WEFT technology is used is http://dol.nic.in
...
> If you do not see the Devnagari(Hindi) written on the above URL in OSs
> other than Windows without installing any fonts, this means that WEFT
> does not work here.
It does not even work in Windows!
The attached screen shot was taken on Windows 98, with Netscape 6.2.
(I have taken only part of the window, and I have reduced the colour-
depth to 4 bits, in order to keep the file small.)
The Devanagari in the upper left corner is really an image; so, there is
nothing mysterous about it.
The gibberish in the lower center is apparently meant to be Devanagari;
but this does not work. Even when I enable JavaScript for Navigator,
the Devanagari does not display. (Though the page contains JavaScript,
it does not warn the user about it; cf.
<http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/interact/scripts.html#h-18.3>.)
Frankly, the only way I can see to achieve a reasonable result is to use
Unicode,
- either UTF-8, and announce it in the HTTP headers (or in an equivalent
Meta tag),
- or NCRs, cf. <http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/charset.html>,
particularly <http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/charset.html#h-5.3.1>.
Font tages with face attributes are clearly bound to fail in many ways,
cf. <http://alis.isoc.org/web_ml/html/fontface.en.html> and
<http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/charset/fontface-harmful.html>.
Best wishes,
Otto Stolz
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Mon Jul 01 2002 - 12:56:07 EDT