Re: Web pages & Jp. text -THANKS ALL

[Jonathan Q <jq@example.com>]

Stephen Lee (sl@example.com) wrote:

Stephen> You should put in the metatag anyway.  People like me switch between

Yes, you certainly should.  Charset information is not some optional nicety,
it is *mandatory* in the HTML specification and has been for a very long time.
It is mandatory for any charset, including iso8959-1.  Despite that,
a disturbingly large number of professional content developers either
don't know this or choose to ignore it (mostly the first one, I think).
Some may argue that I'm using the term "professional" rather loosely,
but on the other  hand, a lot of large web sites that were obviously not
done by an office clerk with some spare time fail the charset test
all the time.

Some people may be asking why bother if it's iso-8859-1 anyway.
Take a page of yours and look at it with the charset tag in, and
then remove the charset tag and look again.  Oops, it looks a little
different now.  How come?  Because your browser takes its best shot
at rendering what it thinks ought to be correct if there is no charset
to guide it.  So you get some kind of ASCII.  This gets better when 
the browser accepts other languages, especially double-byte ones.
You start seeing a character followed by a punctuation mark or with
an accent mark popping up as a kanji once in a while.  A lot of you 
probably see this on a regular basis; I do.

So besides making your code non-standards-compliant, failing to do
The Right Thing with respect to charset can - and usually will- make
your page render a little differently than you intended it, and in some
cases it will go beyond that and render incorrectly.  I'm sure some of those
big news sites don't really intend for kanji to pop up in the middle of
their English pages, but it happens.

Stephen> Japanese Auto-detect and Western Encoding because netscape's
Stephen> Japanese Auto-detect always uses Japanese fonts, and some web pages
Stephen> don't display well with that (deja.com or yahoo.com for example.).  Not
Stephen> to mention for people who browse more than 2 languages - autodetect
Stephen> doesn't help that.  Putting in the metatag means less work for all of
Stephen> your visitors and that's a good thing.

Yeah, what he said  :-)

Jonathan