![[Accent box]](../../../graphics/r00093i1.gif)
The
Internet has certainly helped bring people together from a variety of countries,
cultures, and languages. Unfortunately, it has also revealed just how badly
fragmented the computing world is in terms of standards for multilingual
communication. Even though two people may speak the same language, they
often can't send comprehensible e-mail to one another, or read each other's
newsgroup messages or web pages.
The main problem is incompatible character sets. (A character set is simply a way of assigning numeric values to letters, digits, punctuation marks, etc., so that they can be conveniently used on computers.) The situation is simple for English, since almost all computers support the ASCII character set. But for other languages, character set standards tend to differ for DOS, Macintosh, Unix, and Windows (OS/2 generally follows DOS standards). For example, the Russian capital A is character #128 in DOS and Macintosh character sets, #225 in the Unix character set, and #192 in the Windows character set.
So if you want to put up a Russian web page, which character set should you use? Well, different web authors make different decisions. As a result, when you surf around reading Russian web pages, you frequently need to stop and tell your web browser to use fonts designed for another character set. A similar situation exists for Turkish, Greek, Polish, Arabic, etc. To make matters worse, there is no generally accepted practice for authors to specify the character set of a web page or an e-mail/newsgroup message, so it is difficult for web browsers and e-mail readers to automatically choose the correct fonts.
On the downside, it doesn't support cutting-edge web features like frames and Java (as does Netscape). Another problem is that it is a 32-bit program, requiring Win32s (a set of DLLs and drivers from Microsoft) to run under Windows 3.1. I've never found Win32s reliable, and true to form, Multilingual Mosaic crashes readily under Windows 3.1. It crashed almost every time I loaded a non-trivial web page. I eventually gave up trying to use it under Windows 3.1, and wouldn't recommend it on this platform. It does work well on Windows 95, however. The only problem I noticed is that it crashes often with invalid page fault errors when free space gets low on the drive containing the Windows swap file.
The multilingual features of this browser are what really set
it apart, of course. First of all, it recognizes the "charset=xxx" attribute
of HTML's tag. This tells a browser what character set the web page was
written in, and Multilingual Mosaic uses this information to choose the
right fonts when displaying the page. It also recognizes HTML's
Unfortunately, the and
Keep in mind that Netscape Navigator 2.0 has a similar feature. Its term for character set is "document encoding," and it lets you choose between Western (Latin 1), Central European (Latin 2), Japanese, Chinese, Korean, or User Defined. Navigator's implementation is more limited however. It does not provide fonts for any of these character sets, it fails to provide separate menu options for Cyrillic, Greek, Turkish, Arabic, or Hebrew, (you must use User Defined), and it doesn't handle right-to-left languages (Arabic and Hebrew) intelligently.
For all Multilingual Mosaic does right in the multilingual arena, it has a few glaring problems. First of all, it is inexplicably slow at changing character sets (this should be a nearly instantaneous process). Also, its list of character sets is incomplete, typically omitting some or all of those used on DOS and Macintosh. For example, it only lists three of the six Cyrillic character sets commonly used in web pages. Finally, while the Windows character sets are correct, most of the DOS and Unix character sets have missing or misplaced characters. Because of this, one common Cyrillic character set, KOI-8, is virtually unusable for any language except Russian.
Accent Multilingual Publisher is particularly aimed at creating multilingual web pages, and can therefore import and export HTML files. I'm not a big fan of HTML editors, preferring instead to write HTML by hand. However, this program is a capable HTML editor, supporting a very up-to-date range of HTML features (forms, tables, banners, background bitmaps, graphics, etc.). I could easily see where it would save some time, especially for creating tables and forms.
As expected, it handles multilingual web pages quite well. When
you export HTML, it asks you which character set you want to use, and inserts
the correct tag to inform browsers about this. It also flags all language
changes with
Unfortunately, I found a few problems in the HTML import/export features. The worst problem with import is that it often breaks lines in the middle of a word. If you don't remove these breaks before exporting, the resulting HTML will occasionally have a space in the middle of a word. The worst problem with export is that it often gets the order of HTML tags wrong, opening a new pair of tags before closing an old one. For example, in the HTML I created there were sequences like bold and underline and H2 and a hyperlink. These led to visible problems when the page was displayed in a browser. Because of these errors, the exported HTML produced by Multilingual Publisher needs to be cleaned up by hand.
Instead of exporting HTML, you can just save your multilingual documents as Accent Multilingual Publisher files (*.acp). Such files can be e-mailed to recipients or placed on web pages. To read them, your audience can use either Multilingual MailPad or Multilingual Viewer.
Although Viewer is part of the full Internet with an Accent product, it can also be freely downloaded from Accent Software's Web site (http://www.accentsoft.com). The idea is that if you purchase Internet with an Accent, you can create documents that anybody can read by getting a free copy of the Viewer program. This is similar to Adobe's approach with Acrobat (anybody can download the Acrobat Reader for free). However, I feel Acrobat has a few advantages over the Accent Viewer. For one, it can embed fonts in a document, ensuring that the reader will have all necessary fonts available. Another advantage is that Acrobat has readers available for Windows, Macintosh, and Unix, while the Accent Viewer is only available for Windows at this time.
The only problem I had with the suite is that I was unable to resolve a few domain names such as netscape.com, aol.com, and zdnet.com. I've had the same problem with the NetManage Internet Chameleon product, and I'm not sure if the problem lies with these products or with some quirk of my Internet Service Provider's system. At any rate, I have been unable to resolve the problem so far.
This product is really crying out for a thorough reference on character sets, but I couldn't find a single word on the topic. You really have to know what you're doing with character sets, what all of the obscurely-named character sets are used for, and how they differ from one another. At the very least, Accent should provide pointers to web pages where these things are explained.
Street price is about $60, which I feel is quite reasonable considering all that is included.
One year of free e-mail technical support is provided. After that,
you must purchase a support contract.
You can reach Accent Software at (800) 535-5256, or just visit
their web site (http://www.accentsoft.com).