I'm not sure if this has been discussed, but to add a bit more to
this, the reason why Indian sites were using EOT, and Netscape’s
equivalent, wasn't so much that they wanted to use a specific font,
but because at the time of development Uniicode wasn't supported well
on Windows (Pre-NT) and so many characters couldn't be displayed
well. They solved this by using EOT and the likes. Now that Windows
supports Unicode, it is only really a legacy issue, except for those
users using pre-XP OS. Because of this, sites are more willing to
just use UTF these days, if we tell them about the compatibility
issues with EOT and none-IE browsers.
On 22 Oct 2008, at 08:01, Balaji wrote:
As I understand Tamil is a south Indian Language which is one of the
Indian languages that has got highest Internet penetration (It is
also an official language in Sri Lanka) nd Singapre). Most of the
popular websites in Tamil are already in Unicode. I have been
observing that the newer sites are coming only in Unicode and the
older ones are moving towards Unicode.
1. www.vikatan.com
2. http://www.kumudam.com/
3. www.dinamalar.com (news paper)
4. www.thinnai.com
5. http://tamil.sify.com/
6. http://tamil.webdunia.com/
Some of the popular sites that are still not in Unicode are:
1. www.dinakaran.com
2. www.dailythanthi.com
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
] On Behalf Of David Storey
Sent: Tuesday, October 21, 2008 5:46 PM
To: Maciej Stachowiak
Cc: WebKit Development
Subject: Re: [webkit-dev] EOT Support in WebKit
On 18 Oct 2008, at 03:33, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
On Oct 17, 2008, at 3:02 PM, David Hyatt wrote:
On Oct 17, 2008, at 4:58 PM, Peter Kasting wrote:
On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 2:52 PM, David Hyatt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
It's important to recognize that if you flip the EOT switch,
you're going to end up using EOT over TTF in many cases. In fact
if IE *does* in end up skipping TTF files properly, the font you
get in Chrome would actually depend on the specification order in
the @font-face rule (you'd just end up randomly using EOT
sometimes and TTF other times). You'd be the only vendor subject
to this issue by supporting both formats.
Unless we can convince Microsoft to support TTF. Or other
vendors end up supporting EOT. Or we write some crazy parser
hack that prefers TTF over EOT when both are available (ugh).
It's not clear to me whether "support EOT to make it easier to
gain marketshare in India and thus provide an alternative browser
where authors can deploy TTF" is a better long-term bet for the
success of TTF than "try to convince Microsoft to support TTF in
IE".
Microsoft will never support TTF in IE (for HTML at least).
Apparently it's ok for Silverlight but not for HTML.
I think it's worth thinking about how to get Web site
compatibility in India without supporting EOT. See some of the
discussion in the bug for ideas.
Some of the proposals there sound really interesting.
1) Detect when known unusually-encoded EOT fonts are used, and
convert text in that font on-the-fly to Unicode. This has the
advantage that features like "find in page" and copy/paste will
work correctly; apparently they normally do not when the font is
encoded in a way that doesn't match the server-stated text encoding.
2) Restrict EOT support to a hardcoded list of fonts and websites,
in the the cases where we know the compatibility issues are a
significant adoption barrier.
I think either of these would be better than full-fledged EOT
support and I would tentatively say that #1 could lead to a better
overall user experience.
Just to add the Opera 2 cents into this, we have evangelism
activities going on around compatibility. We've known about the EOT
issue in India for a long time now. We have had and continue to
have success in convincing Indian sites to move away from EOT to
more open equivalents like switching to UTF-8 encoded content.
IMHO hard work and good evangelism works out over bending over
backwards supporting EOT.
Couple of quote from our guys:
This was a problem with a large number of Hindi websites when I
checked
last year but it does not seem to be a problem today. I checked a
directory of Hindi websites http://dir.hinkhoj.com/ and most of
them don't
use EOT any longer. The only major news site using EOT on the list
right
now is http://www.amarujala.com/today/default.asp
But I've only checked Hindi websites not sure about other regional
languages in India.
and
Yes, Indian regional sites, especially news sites and religious
sites, do
use EOT.
I've contacted some of them, and a many of those have now recently
changed and switched to UTF, but still a quite a few regional sites
remain
which still use EOT.
Just a quick example, amarujala.com, eenadu.net, iift.edu/
hindisite/ ,
So, yes there is still work to be done, but it is clear that if
there is benefit for the sites to change, i.e., only IE supports EOT
and changing allows Opera/Safari/FF/Chrome to work, then they will
change. I‘m very willing to discuss with the Safari and Chrome
people on how we can work together to solve such issues in a optimal
way, and pool our evangelism resources.
Regards,
Maciej
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