Marc Durdin <marc dot durdin at tavultesoft dot com> wrote:
I'd love to see that in Javascript. Of course then you need to know if it will shape correctly as well for it to be useful to the end user. Dotted circles are only marginally better than square boxes. And that's a much harder question to answer...
I suspect that in the real world, the problem of no support vs. any support at all is more common and has greater ramifications than the quality of support. Couple that with how hard the quality question is to answer, and this becomes a matter of the good being the enemy of the best.
It was pointed out to me privately that some fonts lie about the support they provide, e.g. by providing cmap entries that lead to .notdef glyphs, or by hijacking reserved code points. Of course, in that case the query would return inaccurate results. Everybody has to play fair for this to work.
To the extent that it would be a security hazard to be able to query your browser, or have your browser query the rendering engine, to determine the level of rendering support, there is very, very little that anyone can do to solve Ed's problem that wouldn't be a security hazard.
-- Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA | http://www.ewellic.org RFC 5645, 4645, UTN #14 | ietf-languages @ is dot gd slash 2kf0s
