From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Sun Nov 21 2004 - 17:11:16 CST
On 21/11/2004 22:23, Philippe Verdy wrote:
> From: "Doug Ewell" <dewell@adelphia.net>
>
>> Cryptically naming these two CSS classes ".he" and ".heb", which
>> provides no indication of which is the Unicode encoding and which is the
>> Latin-1 hack, merely makes a bad suggestion worse.
>
>
> It was not cryptocraphic: "he" was meant for Hebrew (generic, properly
> Unicode encoded, suitable for any modern Hebrew), and "heb" for Biblic
> Hebrew where a legacy encoding may still be needed, in absence of
> workable Unicode support for now: ...
A good point, Philippe. Modern and biblical Hebrew are slightly
different languages, and in principle may need different encodings.
There are still some small holes in Unicode support for biblical Hebrew,
most of which will be plugged (in some kind of way) when the current
pipeline empties itself. (Sorry for mixing my liquid container
metaphors.) But the current results of displaying biblical Hebrew in
browsers, at least on Windows, are already much better with Unicode than
with the legacy encoding, because at least IE6 converts all legacy
encoded combining marks into spacing marks. Think what French would look
like if every accent were spacing, and then think much worse for Hebrew
because almost every base character has one or more combining mark.
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/
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