Hello Neerav!
Neerav wrote:
Do any WSG members have experience with non-english language websites?
Yes. I'm from Russia, so I have experience with non-english (especially Russian) language websites.
Currently I'm redesigning one site to make it standarts compliance -- you can see its redone home page at http://mera.com.ru/new/
If so some tips would be helpful. Ive found "Beyond Borders: Web Globalisation Strategies" by New Riders helpful in a broad sense, but not for topics like:
* which is the best way to specify charsets (UTF-8, iso-8859-1, BIG-5 etc)
I think it depends on the commonly used charset in the certain country. In case of Russian language there are two frequently used charsets windows-1251 and koi8-r. I think that utf-8 is also acceptable but as for me I do not use it for two reasons -- my favourite xhtml-editor doesn't work with unicode, and I don't know about support of Russian unicode characters in older browsers (AFAIK modern browsers support it -- I've tested in Mozilla, Firefox, IE 5+).
* which fonts display asian languages eg: Chinese Traditional/Simplified script well
Sometimes I have to deal with Chinese. All you have to do is to setup the Asian languages support -- this will install all the necessary fonts. I don't know about other OSes but on my Windows XP everything works well. Also you can install Arial Unicode from the MS Office suite. Lucida Sans Unicode is also good font, but it has limited support of characters.
* What interface rules of thumb should be applied eg: for any given english phrase, the space taken up on screen will vary for different languages like German which will take more space.
I don't think that there are any of universal rules. That's the issue you have to deal with everytime you are dealing with l10n and i18n. In case of web it is somehow flexible, but in case of software it's the real headache :(
AFAIK, unicode notations are used if your charset differs from utf-8 (for example iso-8859-1), otherwise you should use real unicode characters instead of notations.
* Whether its wise to use unicode notation eg: 相關資料 or some other way to display other languages in a web browser
If you have more questions about this issue, feel free to ask.
Good luck!
Peter A. Shevtsov
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