On 1 Sep 2000, Greg Stark wrote:
>
> > >> can someone suggest me the best way to build a multilanguage web site
> > >> (english, french, ..).
> > >> I'm using Apache + mod_perl + Apache::asp (for applications)
>
> I'm really interested in what other people are doing here. We've just released
> our first cut at i18n and it's going fairly well. But so far we haven't dealt
> with the big bugaboo, character encoding.
>
> One major problem I anticipate is what to do when individual include files are
> not available in the local language. For iso-8859-1 encoded languages that's
> not a major hurdle as we can simply use the english text until it's
> translated. But for other encodings does it make sense to include english
> text?
>
> If we use UTF-8 all the ascii characters would display properly, but do most
> browsers support UTF-8 now? Or do people still use BIG5, EUS, etc?
My experience has been really good. With 4.x+ browsers UTF8 displays just
fine, with the obvious caveat that you have to be using the right
fonts. Generally the people you are displaying to have the right fonts
(otherwise they wouldn't be able to use their computers!).
My only problems were two things: 1. Title bars in Linux just displayed
junk. This was probably both an encoding/window manager issue and a font
issue. 2. People don't want their content in UTF8 - they want it in the
character set they are used to, like ISO-8859-2. So I added support in
AxKit for alternate output encodings.
Of course being XML, AxKit handles different character sets in included
files just fine - everything is UTF8 to axkit.
> As far as I can tell there's no way in html to indicate to the browser that a
> chunk of content is in some other encoding other than what was specified in
> the headers or meta tag. There's no <span charset=...> attribute or anything
> like that.
Yes, there is.
> This seems to make truly multilingual pages really awkward. You
> basically must use an encoding like UTF-8 which can reach the entire unicode
> character set or else you cannot mix languages.
Or use AxKit ;-)
--
<Matt/>
Fastnet Software Ltd. High Performance Web Specialists
Providing mod_perl, XML, Sybase and Oracle solutions
Email for training and consultancy availability.
http://sergeant.org | AxKit: http://axkit.org
