Re: Unicode testing facility

hallam@al1f01.cern.ch
Fri, 28 Oct 1994 02:14:23 +0100


Reply-To: hallam@alws.cern.ch

In article <8FD5@cernvm.cern.ch> you write:

|>If you're a browser developer interested in supporting UNICODE, take
|>a look at:
|>
|>http://emwac.ed.ac.uk/html/internet_toolchest/UNICODE.HTM
|>
|>This contains pointers to a UNICODE test file (in both MSB- and LSB-
|>first order) which could be useful for testing. The files are
|>served as Content-type: text/plain; charset=unicode-1-1
|>as suggested in RFC 1641.

Thanks, I have now obtained the Unicode spec and a set of fonts. If I
get a chance I will have a play. The security stuff is talking my time
at present.

I think that Unicode is the only rational solution to the problem of
writing HTML that works with large character sets (eg maths). It is
just silly to try inventing entity names for all the character codes
needed and expect all the browsers to understand them. Much easier to
state something like &#xx; refers to the base charset of the document
and &#xxxx; refers to the unicode 16 bit character set.

We can then deal with the Han unification controversy in either of
two ways, use a 32 bit encoding and add in extra planes or use the
language attribute to select the specific character set.

On thing I really want to do is to find somewhere to put my
Egyptian hieroglyphs. Would people get all steamed up if a sneaked
a mapping of the Gardner taxonomy into some of the private planes?

Phill H-B.