Arjun Aggarwal wrote: > One such site on which the WEFT technology is used is > http://dol.nic.in > It is the site of the Department of Official Languages, > Ministry of Home Affairs,India. > > I don't have to install any special font on any version of > Windows to view this site. That is what needs to be tested.
The relevant fonts are embedded by the JavaScript program <hindifontsEN.js>, called in the HEAD section. This script does a bit of "browser sniffing", analyzing the property of JavaScript's object <navigator> to determine which kind of browser the user is using. If the browser is Netscape, it inserts a reference to font <DVW-TTYogeshEN.pfr>; for all other browsers, it inserts a style sheet referencing font <DVWTTYO02.eot>. As far as I understand, the problem of this technique is that embedded fonts such as <.pfr> or <.eot> do not support ISCII or Unicode, so the document has to be in "font encoding". Using this technique, it becomes impossible to copy & paste the text, search in it, index it in search engines, etc. On the other hand, this approach provides a seamless access to computers not yet having Unicode support... IMHO, the technique could be improved a bit: <navigator> has a property <platform> which can help determine whether the client operating system is likely to have Unicode Indic support. This hint can be used to present the user with alternate contents: a Unicode version for newer system and a font-encoding version for older systems. _ Marco
