From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Wed Dec 03 2003 - 07:19:52 EST
On 02/12/2003 16:25, Frank Yung-Fong Tang wrote:
>...
>"a barrier to proper internationalisation" ?
>
>My opinion is reverse, I think it is a "strategy to proper
>internationalization". Remember, people can always choose to stay with
>ISO-8859-1 only or go to UTF-8 with MES-1 support for European market.
>UTF-8 with MES-1 support does not mean other characters won't work in
>their product, but instead, it mean other charactrers are not Quality
>Assuranced in their products.
>
>
Well, Frank, I am surprised that you favour encouraging developers to
design their systems with only the European market in mind. Surely it
would help with internationalisation for Thailand if the system is
designed with support for Thai and other scripts in mind, even if not
fully implemented and quality assured in the first release.
>...
>You only look at the issue from the developer point of view. But how
>about QA? How are you going to QA the whole Unicode? You also need to
>look at the issue from an end-user point of view, or the "working out of
>box" point of view. How could the end user know what kind of function
>they are going to get WITHOUT extra efforts.
>
>
True, I hadn't looked at the QA issue. I suppose there are two ways to
go here: one would be to aim at support for the whole of Unicode but
only assure support for certain ranges; the other is for the QA people
to work with third party fonts. QA-ing the whole of Unicode shouldn't be
a big problem anyway as most work needs to be done on new features
rather than new characters e.g. if one script using special feature X is
assured to work, a rather quick test should be sufficient to show that
every script using feature X works.
>If you are a QA engineer who is working on a working out of box product,
>how are you going to prepare your test cases? If you are a product
>marketing person who is going to write a product specification about a
>cell phone which do not allow user to download fonts, how are you going
>to spec it out?
>
>
Well, I was thinking of computers rather than brain dead mobile phones.
Mobile phones have long allowed downloading of ring tones, so why not
downloading of fonts? And there is probably already a significant demand
for mobile phones using every script which is in current everyday use,
and so mobile phone manufacturers who restrict users to more restrictive
subsets are being shortsighted - although I would expect that full BMP
support would be adequate for a basic product in this scenario.
>You are assuming a product which is does not need to work "out of box".
>If that is the case, you can ALSO think Windows 2000 work for surrogate
>since you can install or tweak the register to make it work with
>Surrogate. You can ALSO think Windows 95 can support Complex Script
>since you can INSTALL Uniscribe on it, right?
>
>
Right. My Windows 2000 supports surrogates, probably because either one
of the service packs or Office XP installed this support for me. When I
was using Windows 95 I could use complex scripts in IE5 and Office 2000
- the required support (Uniscribe etc) was installed with these
programs. These are things which should be supported out of the box,
although they were not quite in Windows. I am realising that certain
scripts may not have font support out of the box, but that is something
which can easily be remedied.
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/
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