Re: LYNX-DEV hodge-podge of topics (was Lynx updates)

[Drazen Kacar]

Klaus Weide wrote:

> We don't have to accept that for a fact just yet.
> (Except that Lynx will always be limited by what characters terminals
> and emulators provide.)

Yes, but users don't usually have a need for 100 (8-bit) code pages. Only
two ISO 8859-x pages can represent very wide range of languages. Unix
lacks a few things here. For example, if the terminal can switch code
pages, there is no termcap/terminfo capability to indicate this. There
are no standardized LC_CTYPE names, no mapping between IANA registered
charset names and LC_CTYPE files, no curses (or ncurses) functions for
approximation of one code page with another...

> In fact, if WE really want it, we could probably have a Lynx patch
> version with limited but usable, and clean (as far as the major Lynx
> code) Unicode support, in a week.  Really.  
> We would have to define what we mean with limited support, maybe just
> being able to display pages with charset=UTF-8 (there are some) by
> translating to Latin-1.

Not good enough. Lynx can currently approximate Latin 1 characters with any
local terminal definition, but the reverse is impossible. Unicode support
should be able to transpose to any of the local code pages.

> Is it reasonable oberhead to call a translation function for each
> (maybe just non-ASCII) character?

Can it be a table look-up? Function call will be incredibly slow.

> make it available.  Tell me YOU want to look at it to make some
> concrete suggestions, and go over parts of it with me, and I'll put
> it on a Web page _immediately_ (well after doing whatever is necessary
> to avoid disk quota problems..).

If you have problems with qouta and need web space, I can provide some.
Want it? :)

-- 
Life is a sexually transmitted disease.

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