Re: [MiNT] XaAES multi-language help needed

[Jo Even Skarstein <joska@online.no>]

On Sun, 2011-01-16 at 17:20 +0200, Christos Tziotzis wrote:

> Netsurf doesn't have a problem displaying sites since it handles all
> that internally and using it's own engine but what about sending
> information? It will have to translate and it will have to translate
> from a standard. That standard can't be the atari one since no one
> cares enough to include it. Highwire on the other hand I believe does

Making sure that Netsurf understands the character set is a part of the
porting. 

> built-in. Again sending information is the problem. Based on what
> standard will it do the translation? And how does NVDI handle true

It will of course have to translate to/from the Atari character set to
the character set used by the web page.

> You are kind of overcomplicating things. Imagine the simple situation
> of transfering a text file to a windows/linux/macOSX pc for further
> editing. The pc will open it and see meaningless symbols. Infact what

The same happens for me when I share source-files with comments in
Norwegian between a Windows PC and a Linux PC. The problem here is not
really the character set, but that plain text-files doesn't contain any
metadata.

>  you need to do is pass the text file through an encoder program that
> will convert the text to either ISO or unicode. ISO encoding are
> 8-bit, just like the Atari ones and so you don't need more memory.
> Most applications will understand an iso encoding, at least for now.
> (I am talking about ISO 8859-x ones). 

The problems begin once you replace the system font with an ISO-font.
Text-files, filenames and even UI widgets will be incorrect.

Switching to a different character will only work for some. The
character set that works for you might not work in France or Norway.
Converting between character sets will always be needed as long as we
use 8 bit character sets. And it's too late to switch to unicode. That
must have happened 15 years ago when applications were still developed.

Jo Even