LINGUIST List 13.182

Wed Jan 23 2002

All: The New LINGUIST Site and Unicode

Editor for this issue: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar <aristarlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. The LINGUIST Network, The New LINGUIST Site and Unicode

Dear Subscribers:

As we mentioned in our message yesterday, we are switching over to a
new web-design, one based on a relational database architecture. We
think this will ultimately be very beneficial for the linguistic
community, but it does entail the use of new technology, which may
cause some of you problems. One of the changes we are making entails
the use of the Unicode standard. This will now be the default
character set on all our sites.

We are doing this for what we believe to be excellent reasons. One of
the most important things that Unicode will allow us to do is to
include characters from (almost) any script on our pages. In
particular, it will allow us to include material in the International
Phonetic Alphabet. 

It has always been our policy to maintain as much backward
compatibility as possible, for we know that some of you are using
older machines and software. But we feel that the benefits of Unicode
are potentially so large that we must now to some extent loosen our
commitment to this ideal.

If you are using Netscape 6.0 or Internet Explorer 5.5 or later, you
should have no problems viewing our new pages. But if you have a very
old version of either browser or of Opera, it is likely that our new
pages will be entirely unreadable. Our suggestion, then, is that you
should upgrade to one of the later versions.

If for some reason you cannot use one of the later browsers, Netscape
4.7 will also work, though you might need to make a slight setting
change. If characters come up as small boxes instead of real
characters, will have to set the character set manually. To
accomplish this, do the following: go the view menu, and select
"Character Set". When that menu comes up, select "Set Default
Character Set". This should make the pages readable. You can leave
the setting this way, since it should cause no problems for other,
non-Unicode, pages.

Our sincere regrets!

LINGUIST