Well, let's see. HTML/SGML has no concern for a specific platform's native
character set, therefore it matters not that a browser use more than one
font to render the document character set. With that in mind, we can take
common usage of the "Symbol" font as a platform-independent model for
generating foreign characters; this means we need only designate one other
font (which can ship with the browser) containing the missing characters.
The specific single-byte character codes would not be important, as the
browser would have a small lookup table to find its code (look up the
entity name and return the corresponding character code in the
supplementary font). Perhaps even 2 lookup tables, if someone wants to
research a few ISO-10646 codes! All the browser really needs is the ability
to display more than one font at a time on a single page.
Times(R) is the typical default font, so the supplementary font should be
drawn with similar metrics. I believe Fontographer 4.1 can generate fonts
for Unix and NeXT as well as Mac and Windows. Since there aren't that many
missing glyphs, a single 256-character font might be able to include every
missing glyph from Mac, Unix, and Windows, although I'm only guessing as I
don't know a Unix character set from Adam. ;) If the total is indeed less
than 256, then we could even have a sort of "pseudo-standard" for the
character codes, but that really isn't an issue since it's a "private" font
and those codes are not specified by HTML.
Howzzat?
-Walter :)
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