koi8

[Randolph J. Herber]

|---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
|Sender:       "SEELangs: Slavic & E. European Languages & literatures list"
|              <SEELANGS at CUNYVM.BITNET>
|Poster:       Hugh Jenkins <JENKINHP at css.bham.ac.uk>
|Subject:      Re: koi8
|-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

|I cannot speak for Mac users, and I hesitate to burden this present
|message with technological detail, but I have definitely read
|material in Russian (KOI8) over the Web. I have not tried to do this
|with Netscape. I may have been very lucky, but I had no problem in
|getting it to work once I had the fonts.

|I am wondering whether subscribers to this list may expect Russian
|text to be recognised as such by the browser and to perform an
|automatic switch of font. This certainly cannot be done. Standard
|HTML has as yet no code for font changes - a major drawback to anyone
|putting web material together.

This statement re `expect Russian text to be recognised' is not fully
correct.  If the only hi-bit-on text you handle is cyrillic (and this
is a big if), then the `recognition' is automatic for KOI8 and alternative
encoding.  The reason for this is simple: the codes assigned for the
latin alphabet and the cyrillic alphabet (with either encoding) do
not overlap.

|Hence if you are viewing KOI8 material you have to recognise the
|gobbledegook as Russian, and change the font manually. You will need
|to do this for the various elements of the documents such as headers
|as well. A bit of a pain, but it works - or at least it does here!

I have set my Mosaic environment to default to those dual character set
fonts.  As a result, I can see English and Russian text without any
font switching, even on the same display page.

|But like everything else in computing, Cyrillic and other non-Western
|alphabets are treated as an afterthought at best.

A simple fact of history---computers started in English speaking countries,
particularly the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada.  Computers
and their environments were designed by engineers and not linguists.  The
lingua franca of the technical world during this last half century before
the third millenium is English.

Until quite recently, the cost of memory, electronics, and information
transport was sufficiently high to strongly discourage the use of large
character sets.  6 bit character sets were common in the 1950s and early
1960's, 7 bit sets were common in the late 1960s and very early 1970s,
8 bit sets have been common from the mid 1970s to now.  16 bit character
sets are coming online at the present.  There is consideration of 32
bit sets.  16 bits allows a complete set of graphics for the alphabets
of the present written languages and enough graphics for ideographic
language to be useful and somewhat fluent.  As I remember, the breakdown
is 4096 language independent graphics, 12288 for alphabets (about 96
128 character character-sets), and 36864 for ideographs combined.

|If anybody wishes to contest the above as a load of old cobblers,
|please feel free! On the other hand if you want more information,
|I'll do my best to oblige.

|**********************************************************************
|**** Hugh Jenkins                                                 ****
|**** Centre for Russian and East European Studies (CREES)         ****
|**** The University of Birmingham           Tel: 021-414-6363     ****
|**** Birmingham B15 2TT                     Fax: 021-414-3423     ****
|**** UK                        Email: H.P.Jenkins at UK.AC.BHAM      ****
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Randolph J. Herber, herber at dcdrjh.fnal.gov, +1 708 840 2966, CD/HQ
(Speaking for myself and not for US, US DOE, FNAL nor URA.)
(Product, trade, or service marks herein belong to their respective owners.)