[UA-EAI] [Ext] EAI Working group Archives

[Mark Svancarek]

I'm happy to be wrong on this topic!

-----Original Message-----
From: barryleiba at gmail.com [mailto:barryleiba at gmail.com] On Behalf Of Barry Leiba
Sent: Wednesday, November 8, 2017 10:41 AM
To: John R. Levine <johnl at iecc.com>
Cc: Mark Svancarek <marksv at microsoft.com>; John C Klensin <klensin at jck.com>; Don Hollander <don.hollander at icann.org>; Joseph Yee <jyee at afilias.info>; HEALTH Yao <yaojk at cnnic.cn>; ua-eai at icann.org
Subject: Re: [Ext] EAI Working group Archives

>> If the fonts aren't installed, you may see boxes.  That's system-specific
>> and user-specific and app-specific.   I agree with you that it's pretty weak
>> circa 2017.  You may be right that boxes have been completely 
>> eliminated at this point, but I am not sure sure.
>
> At some point, you just lose.  If I send you Arabic text and you don't 
> have an Arabic font, unless you plan to do something heroic like send 
> it to a faraway rendering service that returns a png image, what are 
> you going to do?

Of course.  But the main point is that most modern systems are able to display a good deal of the commonly used scripts without extra downloads.  My iPad, configured for dead-standard English, can still display Wiki pages in Russian and Greek and Hebrew and Arabic and Chinese and Japanese and Korean and....  If I want a nicer Chinese font, I can deal with that myself, but the basic support is there and I don't see boxes.  I even get Mongolian and Thai.

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