From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Sun Nov 21 2004 - 21:27:37 CST
Philippe Verdy <verdy underscore p at wanadoo dot fr> wrote:
> But your advice, Doug, still won't work when multiple fonts in the
> font-family style use distinct encodings: Mixing SIL Ezra with Arial,
> or similar Unicode encoded fonts will never produce the intended
> fallbacks if users don't have SIL Ezra effectively installed and
> selectable in their browser environment.
Don't use multiple fonts in the same font-family style that use
different encodings. That way lies madness.
> 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: this won't be the same language
> however, so a change of encoding may be justified. I was not
> advocating for mixing encodings within the same text for the same
> language...
Don't mix encodings within the same text REGARDLESS of the languages
involved. If "Unicode support" (meaning "font and rendering-engine
support") is inadequate for one of the languages, then the same
non-Unicode encoding should be used for the whole document.
Documents that used different 8-bit encodings for French and Russian, or
French and Hebrew, or whatever, were central to the ISO 2022-based chaos
of the 1980s. Rendering these properly was difficult and painful.
Let's not start recommending that path again.
I do see your logic in choosing "he" and "heb," but "heb" looks like it
could also stand for just "Hebrew." In fact, "he" and "heb" are
actually the ISO 639 alpha-2 and alpha-3 codes, respectively, for
Hebrew, with no difference in meaning. Class names (or other
identifiers) should not be so short that they become, well, cryptic.
"hebrew" and "biblical" are possible class names that might be more
easily recognized.
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
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