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Dr Alan Vince <[log in to unmask]>, Managing Editor, Internet
Archaeology, wrote:
>Internet Archaeology has increasingly had to deal with personal names and
>place-names which include characters not found in the HTML encoding. Could
>anyone tell me whether there is any progress on the generation of an
>extended character set and what we should be doing in the meanwhile to
>include such characters in our web pages? If the entire paper was in a
>foreign language we could ask users to switch to a different encoding
>system but for odd words? Bitmaps would look very odd so transliteration
>into the ISO-8859 character set seems the only solution, unless anyone has
>any bright ideas?
The Unicode Standard and International Standard ISO/IEC 10646:1 (the two
are consistent in character repertoire and coding) cover not only the major
modern scripts of the world but the classical forms of many languages.
(Citations and sources for further information are at the end of this
message.)
Both HTML 4.0 and XML (Extensible Markup Language, a data format for
structured document interchange on the Web) specify use of 10646/Unicode.
Both are currently at the W3C Working Draft stage. The URLs for the
relevant sections in the respective Working Drafts are:
http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-html40-970708/charset.html
http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-xml#sec2.3
Unicode is the character set of Java, and is increasingly being
incorporated into products (including browsers and fonts).
However, even the availability of this greatly expanded repertoire does not
guarantee an encoding for every character or symbol that occurs in a
particular paper (particularly true for the field of archaeology).
Egyptian hieroglyphics, for example, are not yet part of the character
repertoire.
>what we should be doing in the meanwhile to include such characters in our
>web pages? ... Bitmaps would look very odd so transliteration
>into the ISO-8859 character set seems the only solution ...
Why not do both? Include a transliteration in the document (to avoid
distracting the reader), but include a link to an image of the text which
was transliterated. In some cases (Chinese provides numerous examples),
different source forms in the original script have identical romanizations;
without reference to the source text or to supplementary information (e.g.,
meaning), disambiguation is not possible.
Citations/Further Sources of Information:
"The Unicode Standard: Version 2.0" (Addison-Wesley Developers Press,
1996). ISBN 0-201-48345-9.
Available from the Unicode Consortium ([log in to unmask]),
bookstores or Addison Wesley Longman distributors.
The Unicode Consortium's Web site is at http://www.unicode.org/
"Information Technology - Universal Multiple-Octet Coded Character Set
(UCS) - Part 1: Architecture and Basic Multilingual Plane", ISO/IEC
10646-1:1993. (International Organization for Standardization, 1993)
Available from your national standards body or the ISO Central
Secretariat.
-- Joan Aliprand
Senior Analyst, Research Libraries Group
-- Ricky Erway
Member Services Officer, Research Libraries Group
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