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Re: LYNX-DEV Patch for development version 0.58


From: Foteos Macrides
Subject: Re: LYNX-DEV Patch for development version 0.58
Date: Thu, 04 Sep 1997 12:08:20 -0500 (EST)

Wayne Buttles <address@hidden> wrote:
>On Wed, 3 Sep 1997, Doug Kaufman wrote:
>
>> I am still confused.  Isn't this the responsibility of whoever is
>> putting up the html page? Anyone placing a web page with a right-to-left
>> language should be doing markup so that it appears correct when read by
>> a browser.
>
>A file is a file.  The data is sequential from start to finish.  If your
>language goes from right to left then you should be able to expect your
>programs to wordwrap at the left side rather than having to write
>interlaced text.  Does that make it clearer?  I admit, until that last
>message or so I was a bit perplexed myself.

        Lynx is not a file viewer!  It is a hypertext browser. Its
handling of input streams is co-dependent on the protocol for the
scheme of that input stream (that now have many versions, which are
not fully backward compatible), on HTML specifications (that now
have many versions, which are not fully backward compatible), and
on "error recovery" principles (for which there are some guidelines,
but can and do vary across hypertext browsers).  The charset of the
input stream is but one factor, and in many "real world" cases, what
that actually is may not be clear.  Even in the case of a 
file://localhost/path  URL, it is not as simple as "a file is a file".


Klaus Weide <address@hidden> wrote:
>On Wed, 3 Sep 1997, Doug Kaufman wrote:
>
>> I am still confused.  Isn't this the responsibility of whoever is
>> putting up the html page? Anyone placing a web page with a right-to-left
>> language should be doing markup so that it appears correct when read by
>> a browser.  Are you implying that other browsers will take the same html
>> page in ISO 8859-8 (or ISO 8859-6) and display it in the reverse order
>> as lynx?
>
>Yes indeed.  Or at least some of them will, for texts in some Hewbrew
>and Arabic charsets.
>
>Actually, according to one Web page I found, this should not be the case
>for charset=iso-8859-8, and pages using the "implicit" (or "logical")
>order should be labelled with charset=iso-8859-8-i; but implicit order
>also applies to Unicode text (including its encoding UTF-8) and the
>Windows and Mac Hebrew fonts.
>
>If I am wrong about this please tell me...

        You are neither right nor wrong, but too rigid in your quest
for standards where they have not yet converged adequately.  Lynx,
like most currently deployed browsers, cannot support a stream with
an iso-8859-6 or iso8859-8 charset in logical order.  What that page
is suggesting is that the empirical behavior of most Netscape versions
should be used, and that is what Doug's patch and the current fotemods
do.  It will be "wrong" when/if the majority of deployed hypertext
browsers behave link Tango, the de facto "test bed" browser for the
"i18n" RFC, but they still will not be behaving as if "a file is a
file" -- they will be taking into account a large variety of markup,
and style sheet directives, regulating logical <--> visual(spoken,
palpated) orders, which a file viewer does not do! 

        The hope, way back when v2.6 was released, was that Rob
would implement style sheet handling (not just colorizing) and
then you would implement "i18n RFC quality" charset handling.
Time is running out (so stop "procrastinating" :).

                                Fote

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