LiveCode's handling of Unicode glyphs being dependent on the underlying OS

[Mark Waddingham]

On 2017-03-28 13:20, Richmond via use-livecode wrote:
>> I'd point out that TenFourFox is a fork of FireFox and is not a 
>> Mozilla project.
> 
> Is that a point that anyone who is prepared to go on running a PPC Mac 
> should
> be worried about?

They probably won't be - until the project ceases to be because a lack 
of support / input / people to use it...

What I was more trying to indicate was that whilst we (LiveCode) will 
not be directly supporting older operating systems, there is no reason 
why a similar community-led project could not exist for LiveCode to 
bring it back to older systems. Admittedly, this is not an easy project 
(if it was then the evaluation of whether we could continue to support 
them ourselves would potentially have turned out differently) but it is, 
at least, possible.

> My original point was that I feel the word "unusable" is a way too
> strong way of saying "not
> up-to-date in the least".

Hehe - perhaps it was a little strong and I perhaps should have made it 
more specific. So "Unusable" if you need to interact with a lot of 
modern web-services and such through a fully compliant browser (i.e. 
general day-to-day use, instead of specific cases).

> I'm NOT going to make Amazon purchases with my Debit card on my G3 
> iMac!

Or indeed, let any information-which-needs-to-be-encrypted flow over the 
internet connection. To be fair, browsers tend to be somewhat unique in 
that they typically use their own entire network stack - relying only on 
the OS's bare sockets. So, a project like ForTenFour will likely be as 
secure as using a browser on any other more recent operating system. 
However, any app which uses system services will likely be a potential 
problem.

However, agin, this matters not one whit if the machine is not using / 
connecting to the internet or only doing so through applications which 
are known to be safe.

> I have a friend who drives a 1980 Lada: it's great because as its
> incredibly "primitive" not having
> any on board computers anything that goes wrong can generally be
> sorted out with a spanner,
> a soldering iron and a few vulgar words.

Sounds a bit like computers from the 1980's too! (The spanner usually 
being used to hit the case, rather than actually spanner anything ;))

Warmest Regards,

Mark.

-- 
Mark Waddingham ~ mark at livecode.com ~ http://www.livecode.com/
LiveCode: Everyone can create apps