On Thu, Jun 4, 2015 at 12:43 AM, Chris <[email protected]> wrote: > > Characters are 64 bit. 32 bits are stripped off as the “character set > provider ID”. That is sent to one of many canonical servers akin to DNS > servers to find the URL owner of those characters. At that location you’d > find a number of representations of the character whether TrueType, vector > graphics, bitmaps or whatever. The rendering engine would download the > representation and display it to the user. All without the user having to > know anything about character sets, custom fonts or whatever. > > So you come across character 12340000000017. The OS asks charset server > who owns charset 1234. They reply “facebook.com/charsets”. The OS asks > facebook.com/charsets for facebook.com/charsets/17/truetype/pointsize12 > representation. > > All this happens invisible to the user. Of course if it is already cached > on their machine, then it wouldn’t happen. >
Just in case you haven't considered this, there are LOTS of circumstances where this could be a problem from a user's perspective, or even abused by the provider. We've already moved largely from automatically displaying *images* of remote origin in email for privacy concerns—I don't really need Facebook (in your example, but substitute for an abusive spouse or a repressive government if it makes you feel better) knowing when I am reading plaintext documents on my own local machine. Thanks, Parker
