Re: TECH: Re: Encourage new browser or use ASCII?

On Sun, 1 Aug 2004 01:32:46 -0400, Ben Poplawski <thebassplayer@...>
wrote:
> On Sat, 31 Jul 2004 23:17:20 -0600, Muke Tever <hotblack@...>
> wrote:
>
>> Not everyone has their own computer they can install modern programs on.
>> Some people are stuck with library access or whatnot.   (Ask me about
>> the joys of trying to log in with a non-ASCII username while on vacation
>> sometime.)
>>
>> [And Firefox's stubborn continued lack of implementation for the CSS2
>> property 'inline-block', breaking my beautiful furigana templates, has
>> really soured it for me.] :p
>
> Really? I didn't know that. I thought Firefox was mucho up-to-date on W3C
> standards. Yeah, but IE6 borkens a lot of what I like to do, and to a
> much greater degree than Firefox.
The bug report is at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9458
Sadly it *does* work in IE >_<

> Furigana? Nihongo ga wakarimasu, ne? What's your site url?
My websites are in my .signature.

The site I was trying to implement it on is
http://la.wiktionary.org/wiki/Usor:Mycēs/Harenarium
(The word after "Usor:" is "Myces" with an e-macron, in case the list
mangles it)

In well-behaved browsers the kana for "iruka" appear above the kanji, and
the kanji appears on the line as if it were regular text.  In Firefox the
linebreak between the kana and kanji becomes an ordinary linebreak (the
command to display as a block is ignored).

[For those looking at the HTML source:  the reason the inline-block is
applied to a <b> tag is because wiktionary's HTML parser will
automatically preface block elements with </p>, causing a new paragraph to
begin; and <span> is not a supported part of the site markup.  The same
problem though would manifest using more conventional containers.]

>>> And then again, using Unicode extensively is a real pain in the ***,
>>> having to write &amp;#x00E7; or whatever a lot.
>>
>> Maybe this is a hint that you should get an up-to-date text editor ;)
>> and code your pages in UTF-8. Even Windows Notepad can do that these
>> days.
>
> Code it in UTF-8. Okay. Does it automatically put it in? I usually only
> use Notepad when I'm messing with TXT and CSS files.
You can enter it automatically, but I'm pretty sure you have to remember
to save it as UTF-8.

> Either way, I do have a fairly up-to-date html editor. I use a user macro
> for hexagonal Unicode numbers, it automatically inserts &amp;#x0|; with
> | as the cursor. 'S pretty cool.
I use UltraEdit in Unicode editing mode, which works well for me (it'll
even display my Gothic font, which apparently won't even work in MS Word
anymore). :|

>> I would suggest also letting the user's browser choose fonts for Unicode
>> text, or at least making sure the stylesheet recommends fonts that
>> contain the characters you intend to use; browser font substitution can
>> be an ugly thing.
>
> Sounds good. How does one recommend other fonts for Unicode, etc.? I'm
> not familiar with that. Would that be a span element set to Lucida Sans
> Unicode, or what?
That should work.  (There are nicer options too, such as Gentium,
Thryomanes, and Code2000...[1] though these are serif fonts, not
sans-serif like the rest of your site.)

> And how does that solve my IE6 unicode woes? It botches the Unicode in
> both mine and David Peterson's web pages.
I don't know whether it will or not.  I gave up on IE long ago.  But if I
remember correctly, IE doesn't have a browser font substitution mechanism
like Opera and Firefox have, where if you ask it to display a character
that's not in the current font, it'll look for it elsewhere; so specifying
use of a font that *does* have the characters *should* fix the problem.

	*Muke!
[1] Yes, Code2000 is not exactly beautiful.  But I am biased against
sans-serif.
--
http://frath.net/  (my website)
http://kohath.livejournal.com/
http://kohath.deviantart.com/

http://wiki.frath.net/ (conlangs and concultures)

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