Believe me, I'm listening to what y'all are telling me.
It is a tricky business because for a French typist I can use entities
and change an � into é but with Chinese everything comes up
unreadable (as you've mentioned). I think this is going to end up
being a case by case scenario - is this how it's done?
Unfortunately, even though I worked in a translation office for some
time, I don't have much experience at this end of things (I only did
design back then, no programming). While I can smoothly transition the
insertion of xml:lang and lang attributes into my form elements as
needed, it just doesn't feel like it's the right thing to do (of
course, this feeling has no basis in reality).
There will be a situation where one page will have the header encoding
in ZH and an input/text field as EN-US. I'm pretty sure that the field
itself won't establish the language parameters that go into the field -
the operating system will. I'm confused, aside from hoping that the
user will understand what needs to go into the field, how this will
work. Or perhaps this is purely a design/usability issue.
One thing I don't understand though, is at what point does the computer
actually use the xml:lang attribute? At the input (client-side)? When
it gets to the server/table (server-side)? I can type any language I
want into the textarea, but what comes out can vary...
And one more thing, my language declaration (in the header)...I've seen
so many different kinds and read a few articles on the subject but I
don't know exactly where to go on this:
en
en-us
en-gb
zh
zh-hans
etc.
What, where, which formats do I use and stick with if the idea is to
support just about any lanugage that's out there (theoretically)?
Thanks for the help...v
On Jun 2, 2005, at 10:46 PM, Juergen Auer wrote:
On 2 Jun 2005 at 16:49, Vaska.WSG wrote:
It's for a multilanguage site and base language will be English.
Everything on the form will be English except the actual input
(textarea).
Hello Vaska,
I think you are mixing two things which should be separated.
The first problem is the language of the page (defined in the header)
or the language of a block (defined like <div lang='en-us' in a
german document). Your page is english - so mark it as english.
The second problem is how to create a non-ascii character. There you
can use a codepage, ISO-8859-6 or something - and then you will have
problems showing characters which are not in this special codepage.
Additionally, you may use the hex-code (A = A), but this is
also hard: Read a chinese text coded with entities - its not
possible.
There it's better to use UTF-8 - you will see the characters
directly.
Additionally, you may use some of the mathematical symbols, dingbats
(x2701 - x27BE) or the IPA (international phonetic alphabet). These
with entities - terrible. But you can't define a language - you can
use all these symbols in any language you can write.
Best Regards
Juergen Auer
http://www.sql-und-xml.de/
******************************************************
The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/
See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm
for some hints on posting to the list & getting help
******************************************************
******************************************************
The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/
See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm
for some hints on posting to the list & getting help
******************************************************
