At 03:39 PM 7/2/02 +0200, Michael Jansson wrote: >Modern browsers know how to show the characters 'A'-'Z' and a few other >characters as long as you don't expect to format the text with a specific >font. You will get into trouble as soon as you want to use a font or >characters from other languages. You may find a solution for some languages >and some fonts on some platforms. Yet again, this is far from claiming that >modern browsers can show text.
This is text. Changing fonts is just flash. And frankly, no modern browser has any trouble with anything from Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, or CJK; Hebrew, Thai, Arabic and any script that doesn't shape or combine is usually supported too. I'd say they show text just fine. >(I do not consider solutions where you have >to download a 10MB+ language package to see a page in a foreign language. >It's not a viable solution.) So you'd rather download the fonts every time you want to view a page, rather than just once? It's not like any one can't afford 10MB of space anymore. >So what we have today are applications called "web browsers" that are very >good at showing images, and animations. They are not very good at showing >text, other than unformatted English text. If you want to nitpick, they aren't that good at showing images; look at how modern browsers fail the PNG transparency test one of these days. And for most animations, you have to download 10MB+ plugins. Every web browser since the beginning of time has supported at least bold, italics and headings. And HTML has become a very common medium for formatted text, and not just for English. Yes, they have failures in complex situations that haven't had much work in them; no, not every font has or will have every language in it. And if you want Adobe Acrobat, you know where to find it; web browsing was never intended to give full control over fonts and display to the creator of the documents; it was intended to give control over _meaning_.
