Re: LYNX-DEV Patch for development version 0.58

[Foteos Macrides]

Doug Kaufman <address@hidden> wrote:
>On Tue, 2 Sep 1997, Klaus Weide wrote:
>
>> Part of your change is to make the iso06_uni.tbl and iso08_uni.tbl used.
>> They were always in the src/chrtrans directory (without the 'M' and 'O'
>
>Sorry, I never noticed them before and thought that they had just been
>added.
>
>> the scripts for which they are used (Hebrew, Arabic) are written
>> right-to-left, for which lynx doesn't have support, I thought those
>> charsets might not be useful for anyone.  I think I have never seen
>
>These are actually Latin/Arabic and Latin/Hebrew, with the lower order
>characters US-ASCII and the higher order characters in Arabic or Hebrew.
>I don't have the Arabic character set available for my DOS machine, but
>I did set my character set to ISO 8859-8 and checked conversion from
>the ISO 8859-1 test set. This converted well and should be useful for
>someone with Latin/Hebrew as their usual display character set, trying
>to browse the web and read pages in ISO 8859-1 or other common character
>sets. There are web pages written in Hebrew. I don't know if they use
>this character set. Since you only have to read the page and not write
>it with lynx, I don't see where left-to-right or right-to-left makes a
>difference. Is there an internal problem with the representation that I
>am missing?

        There are numerous pages on the Web which use iso-8859-8, which
is a charset, not HTML markup, and it's important for the developers to
understand the difference and not draw inappropriate inferences.  Many
of these pages use ALIGN=RIGHT to assist in readabilty.  You'll also
see use of PRE within which English is positioned on the left and
Hebrew on the right.  There is no reason why Hebrew speaking Lynx
user should not be able to view these pages with the Hebrew characters
properly represented, and they will be no worse off than users of most
other deployed browsers.  Hebrew-speaking Lynx users who have iso-8859-8
available, and have added Doug's patch to the devel code, or are using
the current fotemods, might, for example, wish to look at:

   Linkname: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem - Information Page
        URL: http://www1.huji.ac.il/www_dir/hebrew_u/hebrew_u.html
    Charset: iso-8859-8

and decide whether there really is any good reason not to make iso-8859-8
an available Lynx display character set.  Equivalent reasoning applies
to iso-8859-6 (Arabic).

        The IETF's "i18n" RFC, accessible via the online 'h'elp, most
of which has been incorporated into the W3C's so-called HTML 4.0 draft,
also accessible via the online 'h'elp, added additional HTML markup,
such as a DIR attribute, and a BIDI element, for yet better handling
of such languages/charsets.  Lynx v2.7.1, and thus also the devel and
fotemods code sets, recognize that new markup, but do to not yet actually
use it.  Neither do most other browsers (get Tango, now!, if you
want it now :).  The need to implement the new HTML markup is independent
of the need to support the iso-8859-06 and iso-8859-08 charsets.  Stop
mixing apples and oranges.

                                Fote

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 Foteos Macrides            Worcester Foundation for Biomedical Research
 address@hidden         222 Maple Avenue, Shrewsbury, MA 01545
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