On 08/08/2005, at 1:47 PM, Kwok Ting Lee wrote:
2. Additionally, I am likely going to be posting entries that will be partly in Chinese (quotations from the original text together with my translations and comments, so that knowledgeable readers can refer to the original themselves to judge whether I've made any mistakes), and was planning on using UTF-8 encoding to encode my blog. Anyway, the question I have is (and this may be somewhat off-topic), but how would one go about hiding the Chinese characters for those people who do not have Chinese fonts enabled on their system? (To avoid those ugly squares or "?" that show up when people who don't have Chinese fonts installed -- a not inconsiderable fraction of my readership -- access my site.) I've been thinking of two ways: A. A cookie and a PHP script that would be set once (manually) to opt-in for the Chinese fonts (presumably anyone who does that will have the fonts installed on their system). B. Storing the Chinese text (poems and prose excerpts) in a separate file and linking to it from the translated version.
Or C: Make an optional graphic for the Chinese text and link to it, so that people who don't have the fonts installed can opt to see the text anyway. They still might see an ugly jumble (unless you also put the normal Chinese text in a popup and linked to that too) but at least they would be able to see the text.
Actually, just had a thought as I type: using one of the many accessible pop-up techniques you could have them both included in the page, hidden away for people with descent browsers, and easily available for people to select which version they want to look at.
Just my ramblings as I procrastinate. Seona. ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
