Re: [tlug] Big5 Vs. Unicode Vs. Netscape 4.x Vs. deadline

[momoi@example.com (Katsuhiko Momoi)]

Jonathan Byrne wrote:

> Let me present you with a hypothetical situation.
>
> I disavow any association with it except for having
> recently hypothetically stepped into a sort of hypothetical
> rescue-kibitzer role.
>
> A company developed a database-backed intranet for a certain
> other, large company's office in a rather prosperous part of
> China.  The initial development was in English and now a Chinese
> translation is being done.  The programmer working on this
> created the Chinese-language entries in the database in Unicode.
>
> Today, she learned some interesting facts:
>
> 1) Netscape 4 doesn't support Unicode; 

This is not true. Netscape 4 does support Unicode. However, the font 
assignment is not automatic as on IE5/6. On Netscape 6.x and later, font 
assignment is automatic and users can expect Unicode display to work 
without any tinkering. Could it be that font setting might be the 
primary cause of the problem? In that case, you can this page I wrote:

http://wp.netscape.com/eng/intl/basics.html#setup

You can choose "Unicode" as the encoding and then assign a Chinese font 
in case the primary need is to display Chinese characters (Simplified or 
Traditional as the case might be).

There might be some bugs in NS 4.x support of Unicode, and it that case, 
there might be a way to work around it. More info is appreciated.

- Kat

>
>
> 2) 90%+ of the customer's staff are using Netscape 4.
>   Telling them to upgrade is out of the question.
>
> The site is using JBoss and Apache for Windows, along with
> some Other Company's database.
>
> Her options at this point would seem to be:
>
> 1) Write or find a servlet that will convert the Unicode
>   in the database to Big5 on the fly;
>
> 2) Throw all caution to the wind and convert the entire
>   database to Unicode and be done with it.
>
> Oh, and did I mention that the project due date is Friday, so
> she's expected to have it in the customer's hands on Thursday so
> they can start checking it before the weekend?
>
> No milestone versions or betas have been done at all.  Like I
> said, I disavow all association with that hypothetical project.
>
> I also hypothetically advised her that she really needs to
> have a good input filter to make sure that whatever the
> customer's staff input to the database, it is converted to Unicode or 
> whatever else the database ends up finally using,
> since otherwise your database will doubtless quickly fill with
> all sorts of crap.
>
> She seems a bit too young to know about ugly old browsers and
> a bit thin on knowledge of the pitfalls of mutli-byte platforms
> issues.
>
> So, my question to you good people (and BOFHs :-) is, "What would
> you advise her to do?  I'm sort of leaning toward solution 2, plus
> the input filter (of course), since the customer has thousands
> of employees and all of that outbound conversion could lead to
> significantly elevated server loads that they haven't planned
> on or budgeted for.  On the other hand, keeping the database in
> Unicode is probably a cleaner solution.
>
>
> TIA,
> Jonathan
>
>
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-- 
Katsuhiko Momoi <momoi@example.com>
Senior International Manager, Web Standards/Embedding
Netscape Technology Evangelism/Developer Support