There are several questions in this one sentence. I'll try to describe
in as non-techinical manner as possible.
Computers communicate in the language of bytes numbered
from 0-255.
You can think of a font as a glyph or a shape associated
with each of these numbers 0-255.
Out of this 0-255, 0-127 is the ascii and 128-255 is the
so called 'extended-ascii'. Extended ascii is usually used
for characters in non English European languages. All the
characters on the American keyboard are handled with ascii
i.e. 0-127.
Some of the mail handling programs subtract 128 from the
character being transmitted, i.e. if I send you the character
173, it'll give you 173-128=45. If you want sound more
technical you would say "the eigth bit is chopped off".
Since mail handling programs are distributed all over
the world it is difficult to be sure that whatever you
send in the 128-255 range reaches correctly. Don't ask me why
we have this situation. It is due to historical reasons and
we have to live with it for quite some time.
As far as netscape is concerned, it has no problem receiving
the characters when browsing on Web. But don't bank on preserving 0-255
characters in an email going off to somebody from netscape.
Since Indian languages have far more characters than 256, font
designers try to construct syllables by combining different
characters. So what looks like 'mu' on screen will be a combination
of more than one character, typically 2 or 3 characters.
Indian language fonts can be divided into two categories,
(1) those that reserve 0-127 to English and restrict the
Indian language glyphs to 128-255
(2) those that use 0-255 for Indian language glyphs
Naturally, category (2) fonts would look better than category (1)
fonts. They are very well suited for word processing, where switching
between different fonts is very easy. Potana, Mukkavilli, and Anu
are category (2) fonts. These are very well suited for wordprocessing
where switching between fonts is very easy.
However, for browsing the Web, category (1) fonts are much better
suited because it is painful to switch fonts depending on
what you click. Even then it is fairly common to mix English and
Telugu. If you choose a font like Potana, it will try to read all
the English messages in Potana resulting in some grabage.
To summarise, the answer to your question is there is no simple
way yet to display Telugu netscape screen in a useful manner. We
need to construct category (1) font to browse Web in Telugu. It
won't look as good as Potana because all the syllables have to
be constructed with fewer glyphs. Kishore has already constructed
a catgory (1) X font. But it exists for only one size now and to
make use of the full power of Web, fonts in several sizes. And
for working on PC/Mac somebody needs to construct a category (1)
Truetype/Postscript font.
Ramana