Dear Editor:
In your recent issue, you note that the government of the Republic of China has set up a number of sites on the World Wide Web. I've visited those sites myself; they are really first-rate. Even better is the Taiwan Students Association site (www.roc-tsa.com), in the creation of which some very talented people have exercised considerable programming talent. The New York Chinese Information and Culture Center site offers a wealth of information cross-referenced with fingertip control by another Chinese graduate student from Taiwan, studying here at New York University. I have even seen Sinorama's fabulous Web presence. Say then, the Republic of China has embraced the World Wide Web and taken proper advantage of its special character.
The most visible recognition of this has come from Microsoft. When the company released its favorably reviewed Web browser, Internet Explorer v. 3.0 in August, part of its initial release package was an update pack, a program that added Big-5 compatibility to the standard browser. Install this update of IE30, and local Chinese-character capability is available at the click of a mouse button. The company has since produced a native-version, Chinese-capable browser update. Interestingly, all these versions are targeted to the Republic of China on Taiwan, and support traditional characters. No comparable simplified-character, mainland-targeted version has yet appeared, so far as I can tell. All of these Chinese versions can be downloaded at no cost from Microsoft's W3 site (www.microsoft.com-check to see if there is a local Microsoft "mirror" in Taipei). All work well with both US and ROC versions. I cordially commend them to your computer-using readers.
Accent, located in Israel, is another company with interesting Chinese-language technology-licensed from Bitstream. The company produces a plug-in for Netscape's popular Navigator browser. The company claims to go beyond Microsoft, offering both read and write capabilities in Chinese.
In short, despite the special aspects involved in putting Chinese characters on local computer monitors through the web, a number of solutions exist, from both Chinese and non-Chinese sources.
I follow all this carefully because when I am not teaching other things at the college, I tend to be writing about the use of small computer systems. For more on this, surf on over to my webpages: http://home.sprynet. com/interserv/jenner. And send me mail from there-but not in Chinese, as I confess to being lamentably unable to read the language readily.
@List.jpg?w=522&h=410&mode=crop&format=webp&quality=80)