[sword-devel] Web Interface

[Chris Little]

On Sat, 22 Feb 2003 YTang0648@aol.com wrote:

> Does those text browser support UTF-8, Greek and Hebrew?

lynx supports UTF-8 just fine.  Greek / Hebrew would depend on whether the 
user has fonts and other things set up correctly for it.

Most users don't care about that though. 90% of users will just want 
English.  Probably 98% just need a Latin-* charset.

> Does those text browser build in Bi-Di ordering? Can they display 
> Biblical Greek and Biblical Hebrew? Does php support Bi-Di ordering on the 
> server side so you can convert the Hebrew from Logical order to Visual order 
> on the php before send to those text browser?
> 
> Netscape start to have Hebrew support since Nsetcape 6.2 althought we still 
> have some selection bug there. 
> If we are going to display OT Hebrew, it better to assume the brower could 
> support Logical order Hebrew. It is not fun to add Bi-Di ordering code to the 
> server side. 

Just assuming browers support BiDi reordering is a bad idea.  To do a 
proper implementation, we would need to survey those browers and OSes that 
can handle logical vs. visual ordering and serve up the appropriate one.  
I would be surprised if IE on Win9x did reordering automatically (since 
the rest of that OS doesn't).  Doing the actual visual reordering on the 
server side is trivial since Sword has a filter (basically just a wrapper 
for an ICU call) to do this (and implementing it actually was kind of 
fun :).

--Chris