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Aboriginal Languages Now Easier on the Web

Posted by michael on from the internets dept.

orkz writes "The BBC reports that Canada's Inuit can now publish to the web in their native language of Inuktitut, as well as more easily view websites that contain their syllabic font, thanks to a system a developed by a unique ASP, Web Networks that provides services to socially committed organizations."

6 of 30 comments (clear)

  1. This is? by Otter · · Score: 2, Insightful
    So, this is using server-side font specification to display Pigiarniq glyphs without the user having the font installed, right? I hadn't realized you could do that (What exactly is being sent over the wire?) but it doesn't seem like any great technical advance has been made.

    Good for the Inuit, though! I'm curious to see if they can really implement Inuktitut as the language of government in Nunavut.

    --
    What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
    1. Re:This is? by CtrlPhreak · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Well if you look at the page, what's sent over the wire is an image of the glyphs, kinda like the tex format to image converters. The server must read the code, translate it then convert the output into an image and shove it in the page where it should be before sending it out to the user. Really cool.

      Doesn't seem like a huge innovation, but it's a great thing for the intuit people. The large advances for people seem to be taking something that's developed and applying it in a new way. Good work.

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  2. Ummm...So what? by sepluv · · Score: 3, Informative
    I don't see what this achieves except a quick buck for the company concerned as Unicode has supported canadian syllabalics for ages. One can view Inuktitut pages fine if you install an appropriate font. (It must be a slow news day on /.--or maybe /. gets brown envelopes for these company press-release/ad stories)

    Also how much do these guys know about character sets? The Attavik website uses "latin1" (a non existent charset--should be "ISO-8859-1"--and why not UTF-8 so they don't need images) and is content-free giving no one any real idea what they do. From what it says I think they sell proprietary software to Inuktitut organisations (that they probs don't need) though.

    Also, the companies homepage (which sucks) doesn't have a charset (and is not UTF-8/ASCII) and is very invalid even when you do work the charset out.

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  3. Re:Sounds great! by zaqattack911 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Oh grow up.

    There are a million and one non-profit orgs just like this one that use your tax money. It's a fact of life. If you don't like it, move to Rawanda.

    Second, since I'm Canadian.. these are my tax dollars too.

    Love,
    Zaq
    P.S. Since you are probably 12 years old, this is all a moot point.

  4. Re:But this is in Unicode already by eviltypeguy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    [i]Where's the magic? The translation to graphics on the fly for people with old browers?[/i]

    That's part of what was in the article. The way they're doing it almost regardless of the browser they're using or how old the machine is.

  5. Living Dictionary by Hellvetica · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The previous company I worked for had a part in developing The Living Dictionary at least three years ago now. Sun's site has a short piece on it.