RE: Mixing languages on a Web site

From: Marco.Cimarosti@icl.com
Date: Fri Jun 30 2000 - 10:43:50 EDT


Antoine Leca wrote:
> Hmmm. Writing from top of my head (which is *not* the good
> way to go in such a list), I understood that Unicode was
> the default character set, [...]

You are right (see http://www.w3.org/International/O-HTML-charset.html).

> OTOH, I believe that for upward compatibility, the default
> encoding [...] is supposed to be iso-8859-1, [...]

I was wrong, and you are right for HTML as served HTTP 1.1. The current
trend is that HTML has no default encoding (see
http://www.w3.org/International/O-HTTP-charset.html) so, yes, the meta tag
should always be there in a decent page.

> Well, with current generation browsers (IE5 or Netscape 6),
> it can even work with a font for Japanese and a different
> font for Turkish.

Right, using language tagging within the document
(http://www.w3.org/International/O-HTML-tags.html).

> Yes, but wouldn't it be a very good idea to resume these
> answers in some FAQ at Unicode (or W3C) site, [...]

But it is much easier to bang out inaccurate answers from one's memory :-(
Sorry for having been careless one more time.

W3C has than nice section I've been mentioning so far
(http://www.w3.org/International/).

Unicode has a FAQ (http://www.unicode.org/unicode/faq/), a technical
introduction (http://www.unicode.org/unicode/standard/principles.html), and
a glossary (http://www.unicode.org/glossary/index.html). Probably the
Unicode FAQ should be updated periodically with questions asked on *this*
list, such as problems authoring web pages, selecting fonts, etc.

Among independent documentation, I would cite at least Roman Czyborra's site
(http://www.czyborra.com/), that is remarkably informative.

_ Marco



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