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b-hebrew - Unicode cont. was Re: [b-hebrew] 1 Samuel 7:2

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  • From: "Alain Verboomen - TanakhML Project, Brussels" <alain AT tanakhml.org>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Unicode cont. was Re: [b-hebrew] 1 Samuel 7:2
  • Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 00:18:27 +0200

Dear all,

Just a few words about Karl Randolph's quite interesting email dated /Wed May 18 13:18:08 EDT 2005/.

The main difference between Christopher V. Kimball website (http://www.cvkimball.com/Tanach/Tanach.xml) and mine (http://www.tanakhml.org/ or http://verboomen.starline-inc.de/) is, actually, a technical one:

* On Christopher's site, as far as I know, XML pages are sent as such to the client (your computer), along with an XSLT file telling your browser how to translate XML into HTML. It's thus up to your browser to do the job, and some browsers do it well, some others poorly, some others by no means. It depends, actually, on the presence of an XSLT interpreter coupled with your browser (e.g. MSXML with IE6). Opera, for instance, is not able to transform XML into HTML, as it lacks an XSLT interpreter. IE6 does it well, but IE5 didn't. (Please, Christopher, do not hesitate to amend what I wrote above should I be wrong.)

* On TanakhML site, XML pages are dynamically generated by Apache server side on page request and sent to another server, Tomcat, where they are treated online by Cocoon (see http://www.apache.org/ for more onformation about Cocoon) who interpretes XSLT files to transform XML pages into classic HTML ones. HTML files created by Cocoon on server side are then sent to the client (your computer). Your browser is thus in no case responsible for doing the job. What your browser reads when accessing a page from TanakhML is, actually, pure HTML! XML is only used there as an internal format, on server side, the "lingua franca" of the web remaining HTML.

There are, however, two other, quite distinct problems:

1 - The capability of browsers to correclty understand UNICODE (vs. ASCII). Some browsers do the job great (e.g. IE6, Opera), and some other not that good (e.g. Mozilla and Firefox always display hebrew points a little bit too left from the place they should be in).

2 - The capability of browsers to fully understand CSS. Some browsers (e.g. IE6), for instance, correclty understand "text-align: justify" and "text-align-last: right" clauses, while some others do not (e.g. Mozilla, Firefox, Opera).

We are thus faced to at least three distinct groups of problems:

- XML vs. HTML: does your browser understand XSLT?
- UNICODE vs. ASCII: does your browser correctly process UNICODE?
- CSS vs. HTML-coded style: does your browser understand CSS (normally, yes), and which level of CSS (1, 2 or 3)?

Alain Verboomen
alain AT tanakhml.org
TanakhML Project
Brussels, Belgium
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