[webkit-dev] EOT Support in WebKit

[Balaji]

As I understand Tamil is a south Indian Language which is one of the Indian
languages that has got highest Internet penetration (It is also an official
language in Sri Lanka) nd Singapre). Most of the popular websites in Tamil
are already in Unicode. I have been observing that the newer sites are
coming only in Unicode and the older ones are moving towards Unicode. 
 
1. www.vikatan.com
2. http://www.kumudam.com/
3. www.dinamalar.com (news paper)
4. www.thinnai.com 
5. http://tamil.sify.com/
6. http://tamil.webdunia.com/
 
Some of the popular sites that are still not in Unicode are:
1. www.dinakaran.com
2. www.dailythanthi.com

  _____  

From: webkit-dev-bounces at lists.webkit.org
[mailto:webkit-dev-bounces at lists.webkit.org] On Behalf Of David Storey
Sent: Tuesday, October 21, 2008 5:46 PM
To: Maciej Stachowiak
Cc: WebKit Development
Subject: Re: [webkit-dev] EOT Support in WebKit




On 18 Oct 2008, at 03:33, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:



On Oct 17, 2008, at 3:02 PM, David Hyatt wrote:


On Oct 17, 2008, at 4:58 PM, Peter Kasting wrote:


On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 2:52 PM, David Hyatt <hyatt at apple.com> wrote:


It's important to recognize that if you flip the EOT switch, you're going to
end up using EOT over TTF in many cases.  In fact if IE *does* in end up
skipping TTF files properly, the font you get in Chrome would actually
depend on the specification order in the @font-face rule (you'd just end up
randomly using EOT sometimes and TTF other times).  You'd be the only vendor
subject to this issue by supporting both formats.



Unless we can convince Microsoft to support TTF.  Or other vendors end up
supporting EOT.  Or we write some crazy parser hack that prefers TTF over
EOT when both are available (ugh).


It's not clear to me whether "support EOT to make it easier to gain
marketshare in India and thus provide an alternative browser where authors
can deploy TTF" is a better long-term bet for the success of TTF than "try
to convince Microsoft to support TTF in IE".




Microsoft will never support TTF in IE (for HTML at least).  Apparently it's
ok for Silverlight but not for HTML.


I think it's worth thinking about how to get Web site compatibility in India
without supporting EOT.  See some of the discussion in the bug for ideas.


Some of the proposals there sound really interesting.


1) Detect when known unusually-encoded EOT fonts are used, and convert text
in that font on-the-fly to Unicode. This has the advantage that features
like "find in page" and copy/paste will work correctly; apparently they
normally do not when the font is encoded in a way that doesn't match the
server-stated text encoding.


2) Restrict EOT support to a hardcoded list of fonts and websites, in the
the cases where we know the compatibility issues are a significant adoption
barrier.


I think either of these would be better than full-fledged EOT support and I
would tentatively say that #1 could lead to a better overall user
experience.



Just to add the Opera 2 cents into this, we have evangelism activities going
on around compatibility.  We've known about the EOT issue in India for a
long time now.  We have had and continue to have success in convincing
Indian sites to move away from EOT to more open equivalents  like switching
to UTF-8 encoded content.  IMHO hard work and good evangelism works out over
bending over backwards supporting EOT.


Couple of quote from our guys:



This was a problem with a large number of Hindi websites when I checked  
last year but it does not seem to be a problem today. I checked a  
directory of Hindi websites http://dir.hinkhoj.com/ and most of them don't  
use EOT any longer. The only major news site using EOT on the list right  
now is http://www.amarujala.com/today/default.asp

But I've only checked Hindi websites not sure about other regional  
languages in India.



and



Yes, Indian regional sites, especially news sites and religious sites, do  
use EOT.

I've contacted some of them, and a many of those have now recently  
changed and switched to UTF, but still a quite a few regional sites remain  
which still use EOT.

Just a quick example, amarujala.com, eenadu.net, iift.edu/hindisite/ ,


So, yes there is still work to be done, but it is clear that if there is
benefit for the sites to change, i.e., only IE supports EOT and changing
allows Opera/Safari/FF/Chrome to work, then they will change. I'm very
willing to discuss with the Safari and Chrome people on how we can work
together to solve such issues in a optimal way, and pool our evangelism
resources.





Regards,
Maciej

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