[OT] Converting non-ASCII to ASCII

[CE Whitehead]

Hi, my response is below!

Thx.

--C. E. Whitehead
cewcathar at hotmail.com

Stephane Bortzmeyer bortzmeyer at nic.fr
Mon Jun 25 21:46:40 CEST 2007

>Specially, having escape sequences (&#NNN;) *plus* the UTF-8 is
>questionable since it is trivial to produce one from the other,
>automatically (transliterations are a different thing).

Sorry, it's not quite trivial; I cannot produce the escape sequences for 
those utf-8 characters I cannot get to display (I'm sorry to say there is no 
way here!

Seriously we do not have the fonts available on most library computers; and 
no, patrons  are not authorized to download any updated fonts for viewing 
characters, or an updated browser, etc.

You Geeks forget that not everyone has internet access at home! or works 
from a work computer!  in the U.S., in a lot of places, people use the 
internet at the library; they have Microsoft Windows, games, music at home, 
but not the internet!

I've tried to set my browser to unicode encoding--when it's available; I've 
set my font to Lucida; I cannot get the characters people include in 
documents
to read but ??? and the little rectangles;
what else can I do???
Thx.

(Thus, while I like the utf-8 version of the registry you now have, I hope 
you will keep the ascii version with the escape sequences
http://www.iana.org/assignments/language-subtag-registry

and that we will add to it the transliterations!

Another option:

(1) encode an html version, using the escape sequences in the text source

make sure to point to the fonts that most people do not have (see:
http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-utf8-upgrade

"Fonts not available in a standard installation can often be downloaded from 
free sites by users, and you can point to those sites from your pages. It is 
not desirable to embed fonts in pages because the technology for that is 
proprietary and browser-specific.")


(More Notes:

http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-utf8-upgrade
"Although many mobile phones support UTF-8, some do not. "

Also older Windows operating systems do not support Unicode.
)


--C. E. Whitehead
cewcathar at hotmail.com

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