I'm reasonable (or at least usually ;-)) more than enything else, I'm
a pragmatist.
>The term character is so general that it is not useful.
Perhaps. I like "an atomic unit of information" as a definition, from
which your list can be derived.
>Glyph: An abstract form which represents one or more glyph images,
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Note this. I am lax in terminology, but this is an important concept.
>Font: A collection of glyphs used for the visual depiction of
>character data.
Ahhh....
>This is not a summary, but here are a few URLs:
>http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/html-spec/charset-harmful.html
>http://www.stonehand.com/unicode.html
>http://www.ebt.com:8080/docs/multilingual-www.html (by Gavin Nicol)
This goes back to early last year... but the above are *indicative*
anyway. Please take my paper with a pound of salt as it contains many
terminological inexactitudes (lies??? ;-))
>>Don't discuss the above if you don't understand the full meaning of
>>"document character set".
>
>In otherwords, we should not discuss it on this list? The problem here
>is not that the concepts are so hard (they are not trivial, either),
Abstract. Not hard.
>but that there are too many different terms for the melange of concepts.
>Usually, tho, if you eschew obfuscation, you can agree on a set of
>terms and solve as much of the larger problem as you want to chew off.
Yup. Sadly, people often look at the words as a way to understand the
concepts, and words are such personal things....
>Besides, "document character set" is not even in your own glossary?
Goldfarb 283:28
>If we make VRML own the language & encoding, it will takes months just
>to specify.
Perhaps. I put it as a string rather than an enum simply to allow the
easy stuff to be done *now* an the hard stuff later.
>This implies that the browser/VRML library knows everything about
>rendering all languages, ne?
Ma ne. Sono language no parameta ha hotondo Unicode no tame...
>It's been five years since I looked at this. At that point, it was
>good enough to establish the character set of a string and a font
>that had a 1:1 mapping between indices and glyph images. This is all
>the X server does.
This is *OK*, but it doesn't handle thinks like litigatures very
well.
>Everyone's eyes glazed over yet?
Zen. It's Zen...