On Mon, 17 Nov 2003, AmirBehzad Eslami wrote:
> Dear Roozbeh and Mr. Connie (strange name!),
Yes, his ghazvini friends like him a lot.
> I'm glad that I found two professionals in the mailing list,
> who understand the importance of Farsi "Yeh" and "Keheh"
> problem in the future of Web, and its Farsi content.
Thie issue has nothing to do with the *future* of the web...,
niether with the future of the Persian support/content in web.
It's an issue of historical interest five years from now.
> I'm a programmer and a webmaster, but why I prefer to use HTML
> Numeric Character References? Because It is the common way
> which Web Designers use on their pages. Some persian web
> designers don't know a bit about Unicode, UTF-8 and U+06CC!
Web designers SHOULD NOT use numeric references to present
Persian content.
> Do you know why? Because they never found a good article about
> such topics in magazines, books, and even FarsiWeb.info.
FarsiWeb is not supposed to do so. BTW, there's a link from
farsiweb.info the the great Murkus Kuhn's UTF-8 and Unicode FAQ
for Unix/Linux. If you think you should not read it as it's for
Unix/Linux, then I have nothing more to say.
> But I can refer to that unicode character, using Decimal
> Character References, or Hexadecimal Character References. What
> about UTF-8 Literal characters (if possible here)?
Don't know what do you mean by UTF-8 Literal characters. And one
thing to note, UTF-8 is niether ڰ nor U+06CC. UTF-8 would
be something like \xdb\x8c, just if case it helps.
> Anyway, As you want, I use U+xxxx :-)
This is the standard way to refer to unicodes.
> How to tell the 'User Agent' (including IE, Google.com's Robot,
> etc.) that the document is in Farsi language?
Please use Persian instead of 'Farsi'.
> There are four well-known methods, You may use all of them in your webpages:
3 and 4 cannot be used in the same page, by definition.
> 1) Using 'Content-Language' header of HTTP protocol.
> [SAMPLE CODE:]
> <?php
> header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8");
> header("Content-Language: fa");
> ?>
Better forget this one.
> 2) Using [X]HTML's Meta Tags:
>
> [SAMPLE CODE:]
> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
> <meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="fa" />
Fine.
> 3) The 'lang' attribute at the <html> tag.
> [SAMPLE CODE:]
> <html lang="fa-IR">
>
> For now, create a simple HTML page with the <html lang="fa">, and open it in
> Mozilla.
> Then right-click on an empty area of your page, and choose the "Properties" item
> from the context menu. Enjoy how Mozilla detects the language!
>
> 4) The xml:lang attribute in XML and XHTML:
> [SAMPLE CODE:]
> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML1.1//EN"
> "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd";>
> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"; xml:lang="fa-IR">
One of 3 or 4 added to 2 is the standard way.
> As you know, Farsi Win9x systems are based in Arabic Windows.
> Before WinXP, Micro$oft never released an official version of
> Windows, that really supports the Farsi language. All last
> versions were Arabic.
Huh? MS has Unicode support since IE5. Just that their fonts
have had a bug. P, G, CH, ZH have been there all the time...
Don't mix things.
> So, many software companies in Iran, extended the Micro$oft's
> Arabic Windows to support "Gach-Pazh" characters, But they
> never think about the dotted "Yeh", So some users still type
> "Arabic Yeh" in their Farsi Win9x operating system. I mean, In
> many cases, A Win9x user is not able to type Farsi "Yeh
> (U+06cc)". But there are some Farsi versions of Win9x, that
> support dottless "Yeh".
Just if they were not thinking their pocket, we would die in
peace..
> Of course, there is no any ultimate way to solve all above
> problems about Farsi content. We can't find answer of all
> questions, but we'll try. Any way, we should specify a standard
> to publish Farsi on the Web; otherwise "Gave-moon Pas-Fardaa
> Mizaa-E".
Gaavemoon already zaaide. As you are teaching us how to handle
this Yeh problem, while we are spending our life for three years
now, and you even don't bother yourself to read the archives
first, yes, the archives for three or more years ago, when first
IE5 were out... Ba'le, gaavemoon kheyli vaghte zaaide... Yes,
we have had all the things you are talking about. But all in a
sudden, we grow up, and found that the solution is not to hack
here and there and ..., but is to go the right way, so I went
with FriBidi, Roozbeh and I went on mailing lists, ..., ..., ..,
blah blah. So please turn down the noise, so we can concentrate
on our work. Read the F mailing list archives first.
Have you been sleeping these years that people have used Arabic
YEH instead of Persian one?? I myself prefer to read the
isolated Persian YEH, but not Arabic YEH.
> As a webmaster, I believe: it's Win9x users problem! They must
> upgrade their system to be standard, which completely supports
> Farsi. However, as a Web Usability principle says, We should
> provide them an alternative; As they're still using
> Arabic-BASED Windows, we serve them Arabic.
>
> What do you think?
>
> P.S.
> Guys, I know there are a lot of problems about Farsi content.
> I think It would be better to solve them step-by-step. Thus, I
> don't talk about "Arabic Text within Farsi webpage" problem and
> what should search engines do while indexing Farsi pages, etc.
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