On Sun, 6 May 2001, Edward Cherlin wrote:
> At 11:16 AM +0000 5/5/01, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> > A lot of times on Google, the
> >description for the page found says something like
> >"this page contains characters that can't be displayed
> >in the current character set..." , which is kind of dumb
> >because all they would have to do at Google is make the
> >character set Unicode!
>
> You are assuming that the average user would have a useful Unicode
> font setting. The average user doesn't have a useful Unicode font
> installed. We have not arrived at the point where browsers can count
> on the presence of Arial Unicode MS or Code 2000.
You're assuming that the average user would use a MS IE/Netscape
under MS-Windows, which I guess is true. However, it has to be also noted
that under MacOS and Unix/X11 users don't have to do anything other than
installing fonts for scripts/languages of interest (which can be *argued*
to be often the case 'by default') Netscape (whether 4.x or 6.x)/Mozilla
picks up whatever *collection/set* of fonts(instead of a single huge
Unicode/ISO 10646 fonts) necessary to render UTF-8 encoded pages.
> Certainly browser
> makers are not about to add a font larger than the browser to their
> downloads. Under the circumstances, Google is being polite by sending
> an apology rather than trash.
Alternatively, Google alerts users that they need to install Unicode
fonts or change some settings if they see 'trash'.
It would be nice if Google can be customizable per user so that
users can specify whether they want UTF-8 encoded search results or not.
Well, we can't register our preference at every web site we visit(as
you wrote), but at some of sites we frequent we can do if necessary and
possible.
Hmm, then I'm wondering if there's any http 'mechanism'
by which we can tell the server in which encoding(s) we want to receive
the result in what preference order (like we do with 'languages')
Jungshik Shin
