This discussion between Arash Z and C bobroff is really interesting. It is leading me to places that I have never explored before. This discussion is telling us why Unicode isn't quite always usefull (yet).
After my first experience with Unicode, ( Which wasn't that long ago ), I always thought that Unicode was everything people should ever want and that you should put all those ISO things and fonts in to the trash. When I first saw KOffice 1.2, I thought I was lost in heaven. I saw a complete Office package, with complete farsi support. I could type anything available in farsi languages using it. Including some that are rarely used these days ( like tanvin, e'rab, ... ) At the time, I thought That's it! now, no one needs to get a pirated M$ Office and install farsi fonts or maybe some other sucky package on top of it. I Thought that perhaps all those pain in the ass will be over now. And I always considerd this ( and still do think so), the power of Unicode and Free Software. C bobroff's case though, proved me wrong. Unicode certainly has got it's advantages, but it's problem is lack of some good fonts. C bobroff wants to use special fonts ( Completely acceptable in my opinion ), that are not available in Unicode. So, he has to use non standard methods ( requiring people to install a font on their system ), that , considering many people who can't install them on their system ( like the GNU/Linux users ) is not an acceptable method IMHO. Arash, If the Free software community wants everyone to use Unicode and W3C validated pages, the community should stop f***ing around and should produce some high quality Unicode TTF fonts. We can't rely on M$ Arial Unicode forever. As for C bobroff, I can really see your problems here and I give you high credits for at least trying to solve them. You might be completely happy that 80% of the people are able to view your site, and that might seem reasonable enough for you ( I even think the figures are higher than 80% ), but keep in mind that those 20% are not criminals. They deserve to be able to use the internet in whatever way they want and with whatever browser or platform they like. Remember that wether you like it or not, and wether it was your intention is not, you are now encouraging people to use specific products ( Like M$ IE ), that not everyone wants/likes to use. You are unintentionally taking freedom from people, and this is a pretty big issue IMO. Cheers -- "Our products just aren't engineered for security" -Brian Valentine,VP in charge of Microsoft Windows Development Aryan _______________________________________________ PersianComputing mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/persiancomputing
