On 13 Apr 2005, at 6:16 pm, Richard Ishida wrote:
Hello tee,
Thanks for your explanation of the Chinese problems for Mac IE users. I'd be really grateful if you could point me to concrete examples of these problems. Let me note that my understanding is that the majority of Chinese characters display fine. My guess would be that the characters required to display link text saying Traditional Chinese or Simplified Chinese in Chinese would also work fine - please confirm, if you can.
Wrt my suggestions, note that I said use utf-8 'if you can'. (Note also that much of the time we will be referring to use of utf-8 on pages that point to Chinese pages, rather than pages that are in Chinese, so this would not always be an issue.)
I'd really like to get better quantification of the size of the problem. If you can help me there I'd be v grateful.
Also, there's the difficult problem of whether we should care about people who use outdated technology. I don't think there's a good answer to that. On the other hand, user agents are free so for issues centring on *them* I'm reluctant to relieve the pressure on people to upgrade. OS issues may be slightly more problematic, but I still hope people can be encouraged to move on where possible. The Web will never move forward if we throw up our hands and always design to the lowest common denominator. But that's another topic, and not one for which there's an easy answer...
Based on my experience with other East-Asian languages (Japanese and Korean), IE Mac -including the version running on OS X - does have some problems with those languages, be it UTF-8 or other encoding. The problem is worse on OS 9. For all 3 CJK, the OS lacks support for some of the more complex characters. Encoding those characters with entities does usually work fine for Japanese (Shift_JIS or Unicode), I still had some problems with Korean though (EUC-kr). Due to very small marketshare for that browser in Korea, I didn't pursue the matter. A Chinese friend confirms that this also works for Traditional Chinese.
A second problem, frequent with Unicode, happens when the native language at OS level, doesn't match the language of the page. A little tidbit is referenced here:
<http://www.l-c-n.com/IE5tests/misc/#encoding>
One thing to do is making sure that the **server** is sending the correct headers for the character encoding (.htaccess or httpd.conf on Apache), and not relying at all on the meta tag. This has fixed multiple problems with characters on my side.
And third, to avoid problems with 'broken characters' - make sure not to use Windows Office characters (the nightmare of my job). Mac Office will read them, IE Mac and any other browser, will have problems (typical for Japanese: bullets and round numbered characters).
Also, make sure that a correct font is set in the stylesheet.
Finally, when coding sites for local audiences, using Shift_jis, EUC-KR, ... is really appropriate. I code all my commercial sites in shift_jis. This provides less hassle, esp when dealing with forms and cgi scripts.
Philippe ---/--- Philippe Wittenbergh now live : <http://emps.l-c-n.com/> code | design | web projects : <http://www.l-c-n.com/> IE5 Mac bugs and oddities : <http://www.l-c-n.com/IE5tests/>
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