cwdjrxyz said:
The Armenian text works using the most recent versions of IE7,
Firefox, Seamonkey, Flock, Opera, and Safari for Windows, all on the
Windows XP OS sp3.
There's not much difference to be expected between them, as this is
primarily a font issue.
Regarding my previous note about fonts, I did not realize that Sylfaen is
shipped with Windows XP and Vista, making it rather widespread. What really
happens when you browse a page containing Armenian letters on Win XP or
Vista is that the browser does not find those letters in the fonts suggested
on the page, then checks the default fonts (as defined in browser settings)
and probably does not find them there either; and then it finally uses its
internal list of fonts and probably decides to use Sylfaen.
There's the risk that IE 6 does not get this right, unless you help it by
explicitly declaring Sylfaen for the Armenian text. It may fail the fallback
part. Testing on IE 6 is far more important in this case than playing with
Flock or Safari for example.
The real problem would be people using older Windows systems. They probably
don't have Sylfaen, but they quite often have Arial Unicode MS (since they
have Office). This raises a problem because these fonts are rather
different.
Armenian letters are often smaller than Latin letters in the same font (for
the same font size). For Sylfaen, they match the size and style of lowercase
Latin letters rather well. However, if the copy text font is Arial or
(gasp!) Verdana, Armenian letters look rather small when they have been
taken from Sylfaen (as Arial and Verdana don't contain them). And if you
combine Latin letters in Arial (or Arial Unicode MS) and Armenian letters in
Arial Unicode MS, the size difference is so big that the effect is
grotesque.
Actually I would consider using Sylfaen as the primary font for all normal
text if the text contains Armenian letters. It looks rather nice. When
Sylfaen is not available, the browser's default font would be used of
course, so maybe
body { font-family: Sylfaen, Arial Unicode MS }
would be a practical choice, but then the site would have to be tested using
both fonts, as they are so different in their nature. Of course the site
would have to be flexibly designed, not based on some font's specific
properties.
Also the old Amaya browser complains about
the xml not being well formed and offers to render as html.
Huh? The page
http://mywonderyears.org/links.php is well-formed XML and it's
also valid XHTML 1.0 Strict. There's little point in reporting Amaya
problems - especially with old Amaya - anywhere outside the Amaya
development people, if there still are some.
The old
W3C Amaya browser was not used much by the general public and used
mainly by those who wanted to test W3C code features not then
supported by most commercial browsers.
So why confuse things by mentioning it at all?
There are sites where you can get screen shots using several older and
less common browsers, and using OSs other than Windows.
I'm sceptic about such services especially since this is basically a font
problem and we cannot really know how those services use fonts.
Yucca