Graphic folly in text presentation on the web

There was a movement in the Adobe Flash vein, to have non-Latin script on the web replaced by a graphic image in the browser.  Why would that be folly?

I would suggest installing PeraPera or some such plug-in for the Firefox browser and then placing your cursor in the text of a Japanese poem.  If the poem is by text character (for Haiku, that sometimes will mean more simple Hiragana than complex Kanji), you have a good chance to capture the sense if you have a smattering of Japanese grammar and a pop-up tool with multiple senses for the Kanji.

If the poem is in a Java applet as a graphic, or embedded as Flash, or is an image in PNG or JPG or some such format, you will not have access to pop-up hints from tools such as PeraPera.

Some of the tendency to use graphics may have been based on a 'web-myth' that UNICODE could not be adequate for the graphemes which can be identified in the great variety of scripts in use around the globe. This was nonsense.  UNICODE after 2.0 is in no way like the old code-pages for character-encoding. Visit unicode.org if in doubt. Validate any claim by eccentric or luddite Eastern Language professors who are not themselves computer linguists (linguists specializing in computer science language encoding, or computer scientists specializing in linguistics in the area of phonograms as graphemes.)  Be prepared to learn at least three new technical terms with a very specific sense in the case of UNICODE.

In one of my favourite web languages, Curl, ( from www.curl.com ) there is the class for TextShape to hold an unbroken sequence of characters. But a series of characters as a single graphic is not the same as a series of graphical characters within a single container. Since Shape is also a container for Shape's, this can be a subtle point.

The use of a single graphic need not completely defeat annotation and obtaining a gloss, if the image is accompanied by text as an alternative.  However, for an unusual Kanji variant in a classical text, this is unlikely to be the answer as we are now back to the very issue at hand: how best to present infrequently encountered or otherwise difficult graphemes in text presentations. The snake has taken hold of its tale but need not begin swallowing.

Here are a few related Kanji for Albrecht Haushofer's "Der Vater" from his posthumous sonnets:
 海   and   毒 and, of course,  魚釣

The above kanji characters (the last is a two-kanji compound or JuKuGo) should be visible if your browser view has char-encoding set to AUTO-DETECT or to UTF-8.

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