Unicode revisited, this time with htmlText

Sat Nov 22 17:20:13 EST 2003

On Nov 22, 2003, at 10:26 AM, Richard Gaskin wrote:

> tuviah snyder wrote:
>> It's just that your specification is incompatible with the current 
>> HTML
>> spec, and it is called HTMLText after all. I believe you suggested
>>
>> <unicode>your unicodetext of a field</unicode>
>>
>> We could possibly make this change, but the htmltext would only be 
>> readable
>> within Rev.
>
> I'm glad if that's a requiement, but it's a new one.
>
> For example, specifying font sizes with an integer is not how the W3C
> suggests it should be done, and thing like <font size="24"> can render
> really huge in Netcape and other browsers, yet that's what Rev 
> generates.

Tuviah and Richard, you have totally lost me. What I think Toma and me 
are asking is: Supposing you have an HTML document with UTF-8 encoding, 
with a header like this:

<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

How can I get the file to display in htmlText? (In fact I do have this 
problem in the Project Gutenberg reader I'm writing)

I have to step through every character to call charToNum() and generate 
HTML character entities, then put it into htmlText? For a multi-MB file 
this is simply not going to work efficiently enough. I would rather 
launch the user's browser than try to deal with this in transcript. Do 
you see the dilemma? That htmlText's way of dealing (not dealing at 
all) with text encoding is really problematic for some users?

Alex Rice <alex at mindlube.com> | Mindlube Software | 
<http://mindlube.com>

what a waste of thumbs that are opposable
to make machines that are disposable  -Ani DiFranco