tlug: Japanese Web browser for X

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "Frank" == Frank Bennett <bennett@example.com> writes:

    Frank> Is there a Netscape out there that takes a Jse FEP for input?

Not yet; shouldn't be more than a year, my guess is probably six
months, for the open source Netscape to have stable and reliable
Japanese input.  I wouldn't expect reliability in less than several
months, though; Xlib is buggy, Motif is buggy, gtk has only had
Japanese input for a couple of months.

    Frank> The idea is to supply students with something that won't
    Frank> need explaining, and that won't burn their fingers; I'd
    Frank> rather not rely on Lynx-jp with a stable of external apps
    Frank> (won't work with Imagemap sites anyway), or on the Emacs
    Frank> code.

w3.el is OK, but it suffers from two major problems.  One is that if
you get the fonts wrong, tables will be very ugly.  The other is that
host lookup blocks, and Emacs dies, until it succeeds.  This will make
Emacs users very unhappy, although people are used to waiting on
browsers.  It's also relatively slow, and XEmacs itself is much slower
starting up than Emacs, as well as possibly slower in general (this
hasn't really been proved one way or another in general, but for
startup if the two executables are both in your disk cache, XEmacs is
slower by 20 secs to less than 1.)  But you won't get images or sound
without XEmacs AFAIK.

There was allegedly an Arena-i18n, but Arena in general was never very
stable.  I didn't try input with it.  I have no idea about HotJava
support for input.  Besides, the times I tried it HotJava very quickly
headed for 100MB+ of RAM.

The best bet in a hurry would be a Japanized Mosaic, but you won't get
plugins and you won't get the fancy multimedia stuff I suspect
(although I haven't been following Mosaic development for a while).  I
don't know if there is a Japanized Mosaic more recent than 2.6, maybe
2.5, either.

If you just want images and Japanese, you might look for
"mosaic-l10n."  If you want frames, audio, plugins, and the like, I
dunno.  OTOH, you were talking about Lynx....

HTH

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